Life here and there - 1854 Author:Nathaniel Parker Willis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INCIDENTS ON THE HUDSON. M. Chabert, the fire-eater, would have found New York uncomfortable. I would mention the height of the thermometer, hut for an aversi... more »on I have to figures. Broadway, at noon, had been known to fry soles. I had fixed upon the first of August for my annual trip to Saratoga—and, with a straw hat, a portmanteau and .a black boy, was huddled into the " rather-faster-than-lightning" steamer, " North America," with about seven hundred other people, like myself, just in time. Some hundred and fifty gentlemen and ladies, thirty seconds too late, stood " larding" the pine chips upon the pier, gazing after the vanishing boat through showers of perspiration. Away we " streaked" at the rate of twelve miles in tho hour against the current, and, by the time I had penetrated to the baggage-closet, and seated William Wilbcrforce upon my portmanteau, with orders not to stir for eleven hours and seven minutes, we were far up the Hudson, opening into its hills and rocks, like a witches' party steaming through the Hartz in a cauldron. A North-river steamboat, as a Vermont boy would phrase it, is another guess sort o' thing from a Britisher. A coal-barge and an eight-oars on the Thames are scarce more dissimilar. Built for smooth water only, our river boats are long, shallow, and graceful, of the exquisite proportions of a pleasure-yacht, and120 PARISIAN-ISM IN AMERICA. painted ss brilliantly and fantastically as .in Indian shell. With her bow just leaning up from the surface of the stream, her cutwater throwing off a curved and transparent sheet from either side, her white awnings, her magical speed, and the gay spectacle of a thousand well-dressed people Oh her open decks, I know nothing prettier than the vision that shoots by your door, as you sit smoking in your ...« less