Author: Alexander von HübnerPublisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9781333476434
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 672
Book Description
Excerpt from A Ramble Round the World, 1871 An old man of eighty, the very type of a patriarch, leaning on the arm of a fine young fellow of one-and-twenty, has just crossed the deck. His manners are respectful and yet with a certain amount of dignity. He is an English peasant a Somersetshire man. Sir, he says to me, it '3 late in the day for me to emigrate, but I leave nothing but misery in England, and hope to find at least bread to eat in the New Country. Here are my two grandsons, showing me two lads by his side with a touching expression of tenderness and honest pride: their father and my granddaughter have stayed behind in our old village, and I shall never see them again. He gave a short cough; I looked another way, and he took advantage of it to brush his arm across his moistened eyes. There is a very good library on board - English classics, histories, reviews, and Watter Scott's novels. But to me the most amusing books to study are my fellow-travellers, coming as they do from every quarter of the globe and belonging to all classes of society. The mornings pass only too quickly. As for the meals, they are excellent as regards the quality of the food, but as to the cooking and the waiting, it is Old England before the Reform Bill. I don't complain. I only state the fact. The Directors of the Cunard Company are essentially Conservative. The least agreeable part of the day is the evening. It is difficult to read by the uncertain light of a candle, of which the wick is half blown out by a draught of air from the North Pole, sharp enough to give you the rheuma tism, although not enough to carry off the exhalations of the supper. As to your cabin, in these latitudes in the month of May, you may make up your mind to find the climate of an ice-house. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
