I am unable to say whether the clerk of the hotel was grossly careless or dishonest. Had we gone on board with our passports as he returned them to us, we should have been liable to detention until the next steamer, three days later. In that case the hotel might have profited by our enforced delay, and I have a strong suspicion that the fellow had an eye to business and deliberately deceived us. I expressed my opinion of the whole affair, and we did not part friends.
The steamer sailed exactly thirty-five seconds after her advertised time, an example of promptness worthy of imitation. She was an English-built ship, belonging to the Russian Company of Navigation and Commerce, and rejoiced in the name of Elborus. Officers and crew were Russian, with the possible exception of the chief engineer.
We had a motley crowd of passengers in the cabin. We were three Americans, and there was a fourth--a native of the land of the free--a woman whose talkative power was sufficient to bore a tunnel through Mount Washington, and whose mission was literature and matrimony. She was en route to Constantinople to marry a Turk, but I afterwards learned that she changed her mind and married a Greek. Then there were two or three Englishmen travelling for pleasure, several Swiss, German, and French merchants and commercial travellers, all of them chatty and most of them agreeable, and there were half a dozen Russians, mostly of the gentler sex.
We had not been many hours at sea before a majority of the passengers were on speaking terms, and even endeavoring to make the time pass pleasantly. There was no distinction of age or sex in conversation; everybody was polite, and nobody took offence at being addressed without the formality of an introduction. Nowhere in the world will you find travellers more civil to each other than on the steamers which plough the waters of the Orient.
Among the Russian passengers were three ladies (mother and daughters) from St. Petersburgh, sister and nieces of the Governor { 115}of Odessa. The younger of the daughters was a Lady of Honor at the court of the Empress, and the family evidently belonged to the _haute noblesse_ of Russia.
If anybody fancies that the high society of Russia is at all “stuck up,” like some of our American aristocrats, he would have been enlightened very materially had he made the voyage with that party. There was no forwardness or pertness on the part of the young ladies, neither was there any frigid reserve or _mauvaise honte_. They conversed easily and with perfect selfpossession, and when one of the passengers produced a variety of mechanical puzzles for the amusement of the party, they readily joined in the sport. If they were brought up at boarding and finishing schools I must admit that the Russian educational establishments are more successful in their work than the majority of their American and English rivals.