DEAR AUNT,--At last we have arrived at our journey's end, and we are happy
to have got out of and away from the steamer, where we have been cooped up
for the last weeks. However, we had a very gay time during those weeks,
and some very sprightly companions. Among them a runaway couple; he was a
Mr. Aulick Palmer, but I don't know who she was. One could have learned it
easily enough for the asking, as they were delighted to talk about
themselves and their elopement, and how they did it. It was their favorite
topic of conversation. I was intensely interested in them; I had never
been so near a romance in my life. They had been married one hour when
they came on board; she told her parents that she was going out shopping,
and then, after the marriage, wrote a note to them to say that she was
married and off to Europe, adding that she was not sorry for what she had
done. He is a handsome man, tall and dark; she is a jolly, buxom blonde,
with a charming smile which shows all her thirty and something teeth, and
makes her red, thick lips uncurl. I thought, for such a newly married
couple, they were not at all sentimental, which I should have supposed
natural. She became sea-sick directly, and he called attention to her as
she lay stretched out on a bench looking dreadfully green in the face: "We
are a sick couple--home-sick, love-sick, and sea-sick."
The captain, who thought himself a wag but who forgot every morning what
he had wagged about the day before, would say for his daily greeting, "Wie
[as the Germans say] befinden sie sich?" He thought the pun on sea-sick
was awfully funny, and would laugh uproariously. He said to Mr. Palmer,
"Why are you not like a melon?" We all guessed. One person said, "Because
he was not meloncholic [Aulick]." But all the guesses were wrong. "No,"
said the captain, "it is because the melon can't elope, and you can." He
thought himself very funny, and was rather put out that we did not think
him so, and went on repeating the joke to every one on the boat _ad
nauseam_.