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 Fiddle, 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 pigeon-holes, 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, deacons 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 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.