Thirteen days of prayer meetings

We sailed on a Saturday, in the rain, and anchored in the harbour the first night because the weather was too rough to go out in. The passengers took this as a sign. I took it as weather. We were both right in our way, and it set the tone for the next five months.

By the third day it was clear that the ship divided into two parties. The larger party was the pilgrims, who were going to see the land where the Saviour walked, and who were getting into practice by not doing anything on Sunday, or much on the other days. The smaller party was the sinners, who were going to see Paris. There were about eight of us. We met in the smoking room and called ourselves the Quaker City Night Hawks, though by half past nine we were generally the Quaker City Asleeps.

Every evening at eight there was a prayer meeting in the after-cabin, and every evening at a quarter past, there was a dance on the upper deck, to the melodeon. The dancing was not a success. The ship rolled one way and the dancers went the other, and when a lady in a hoop skirt goes down the deck sideways at that angle, she does not stop for anybody. Three gentlemen were taken off their feet in one evening, and the prayer meeting below heard it and thought it was an answer.

A pilgrim is a person who will travel four thousand miles to look at a place, and then tell you it was smaller than he expected.

There was a man on board who kept a journal, and started it with the resolution to put down everything. On the first day he wrote four pages. On the second day he wrote two. By the end of the week he was writing Rained. Sick. and by Gibraltar he had given it up and was keeping the record in his head, where it is safer from his descendants. I mention him because I was that man, and these letters are what is left.

On the thirteenth day somebody shouted Land! and every soul on the ship came up on deck, including some I had not seen since New York and had supposed dead. It was the Azores. They were green, and small, and they did not have a single guide on them, and I have thought tenderly of them ever since.