_April 5, 1879_.-With the return of spring to the skies, airs, waters of
the Delaware, return the sea-gulls. I never tire of watching their broad
and easy flight, in spirals, or as they oscillate with slow unflapping
wings, or look down with curved beak, or dipping to the water after
food. The crows, plenty enough all through the winter, have vanish'd
with the ice. Not one of them now to be seen. The steamboats have again
come forth--bustling up, handsome, freshly painted, for summer work--the
Columbia, the Edwin Forrest, (the Republic not yet out,) the Reybold,
Nelly White, the Twilight, the Ariel, the Warner, the Perry, the
Taggart, the Jersey Blue--even the hulky old Trenton--not forgetting
those saucy little bull-pups of the current, the steamtugs.
But let me bunch and catalogue the affair--the river itself, all the
way from the sea--Cape island on one side and Henlopen light on the
other--up the broad bay north, and so to Philadelphia, and on further to
Trenton;--the sights I am most familiar with, (as I live a good part
of the time in Camden, I view matters from that outlook)--the great
arrogant, black, full-freighted ocean steamers, inward or outward
bound--the ample width here between the two cities, intersected by
Windmill island--an occasional man-of-war, sometimes a foreigner, at
anchor, with her guns and port-holes, and the boats, and the brown-faced
sailors, and the regular oar-strokes, and the gay crowds of "visiting
day"--the frequent large and handsome three-masted schooners, (a
favorite style of marine build, hereabout of late years,) some of
them new and very jaunty, with their white-gray sails and yellow pine
spars--the sloops dashing along in a fair wind--(I see one now, coming
up, under broad canvas, her gaff-topsail shining in the sun, high and
picturesque--what a thing of beauty amid the sky and waters!)--the
crowded wharf-slips along the city--the flags of different
nationalities, the sturdy English cross on its ground of blood, the
French tricolor, the banner of the great North German empire, and the
Italian and the Spanish colors--sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole
scene enliven'd by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning
from a race down at Gloucester;--the neat, rakish, revenue steamer
"Hamilton" in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting
aft--and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white
steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting
diagonally across from the Kensington or Richmond shores, in the
west-by-south-west wind.