2. CHAPTER II.
SHOWING THAT MANY MEN HAVE MANY MINDS.
“Odd fish!”
“Poor fellow!”
“Who can he be?”
“Casper Hauser.”
“Bless my soul!”
“Uncommon countenance.”
“Green prophet from Utah.”
“Humbug!”
“Singular innocence.”
“Means something.”
“Spirit-rapper.”
“Moon-calf.”
“Piteous.”
“Trying to enlist interest.”
“Beware of him.”
“Fast asleep here, and, doubtless, pick-pockets on
board.”
“Kind of daylight Endymion.”
“Escaped convict, worn out with dodging.”
“Jacob dreaming at Luz.”
Such the epitaphic comments, conflictingly spoken or
thought, of a miscellaneous company, who, assembled
on the overlooking, cross-wise balcony at the forward
end of the upper deck near by, had not witnessed preceding
occurrences.
Meantime, like some enchanted man in his grave,
happily oblivious of all gossip, whether chiseled or
chatted, the deaf and dumb stranger still tranquilly
slept, while now the boat started on her voyage.
The great ship-canal of Ving-King-Ching, in the
Flowery Kingdom, seems the Mississippi in parts,
where, amply flowing between low, vine-tangled
banks, flat as tow-paths, it bears the huge toppling
steamers, bedizened and lacquered within like imperial
junks.
Pierced along its great white bulk with two tiers of
small embrasure-like windows, well above the waterline,
the Fidèle, though, might at distance have been
taken by strangers for some whitewashed fort on a
floating isle.
Merchants on 'change seem the passengers that buzz
on her decks, while, from quarters unseen, comes a murmur
as of bees in the comb. Fine promenades, domed
saloons, long galleries, sunny balconies, confidential
passages, bridal chambers, state-rooms plenty as pigeonholes,
and out-of-the-way retreats like secret drawers
in an escritoire, present like facilities for publicity or
privacy. Auctioneer or coiner, with equal ease, might
somewhere here drive his trade.
Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends
from apple to orange, from clime to clime, yet, like
any small ferry-boat, to right and left, at every landing,
the huge Fidèle still receives additional passengers in
exchange for those that disembark; so that, though
always full of strangers, she continually, in some degree,
adds to, or replaces them with strangers still
more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from the
Cocovarde mountains, which is ever overflowing with
strange waters, but never with the same strange particles
in every part.
Though hitherto, as has been seen, the man in
cream-colors had by no means passed unobserved, yet
by stealing into retirement, and there going asleep
and continuing so, he seemed to have courted oblivion,
a boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant
as he. Those staring crowds on the shore were now
left far behind, seen dimly clustering like swallows on
eaves; while the passengers' attention was soon drawn
away to the rapidly shooting high bluffs and shot-towers
on the Missouri shore, or the bluff-looking Missourians
and towering Kentuckians among the throngs on the
decks.
By-and-by—two or three random stoppages having
been made, and the last transient memory of the slumberer
vanished, and he himself, not unlikely, waked up
and landed ere now—the crowd, as is usual, began in
all parts to break up from a concourse into various
clusters or squads, which in some cases disintegrated
again into quartettes, trios, and couples, or even solitaires;
involuntarily submitting to that natural law
which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in
time to the member.
As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those
oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in
the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives
of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and
men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen;
farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters,
buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters,
truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all
these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined
squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers;
English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa
Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in
cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen,
and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters;
Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full
regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish
young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews;
Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and
mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacóns and
blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning
negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests.
In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots
congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species,
man.
As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock,
spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in
the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended
their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness;
a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance.
Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit
of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which,
uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite
zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan
and confident tide.
