At Tea We Were Served With Some Broken
Meat From The Saloon; Sometimes In The Comparatively Elegant Form
Of Spare Patties Or Rissoles; But As A General Thing Mere Chicken-
Bones And Flakes Of Fish, Neither Hot Nor Cold.
If these were not
the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were
all too hungry
To be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily.
These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge
which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage;
so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I
might as well have been in the steerage outright. Had they given
me porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly
contented with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits and some
whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my
spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females; in the
second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came
aboard I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage
of discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned
that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was
lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to
the same quarter of the deck.
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