The _ennui_ attendant upon public-houses can never be felt at Clifton House. The most common mind finds the spectacle from its balconies a sufficient and untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited parlours, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and bar-rooms filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half-hour to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that sickening yearning for society, which sometimes comes upon a stranger in a strange land, like the calenture of a fever,—the eternal marvel going on without is more engrossing than friend or conversation, more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified freight of adventurers, one moment gliding swiftly down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next, lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up from the scoop of a giant’s hand beneath the water; to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract, to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of the tremendous waters,—is amusement and occupation enough to draw the mind from any thing,—to cure madness or create it.
The Hudson at Hyde Park is a broad, tranquil, and noble river, of about the same character as the Bosphorus above Roumeli-bissar, or the Dardanelles at Abydos. The shores are cultivated to the water’s edge, and lean up in graceful, rather than bold elevations; the eminences around are crested with the villas of the wealthy inhabitants of the metropolis at the river’s mouth; summer-houses, belvideres, and water-steps, give an air of enjoyment and refreshment to the banks, and, without any thing like the degree of the picturesque which makes the river so remarkable thirty or forty miles below, it is, perhaps, a more tempting character of scenery to build and live among.
All along, in this part of the river, occur the “landings,” which are either considerable towns in themselves, or indicate a thickly settled country in the rear. The immense steamers that ply on the Hudson leave and receive passengers at all these points, and, to a person making the passage for the first time, the manner and expedition of this operation is rather startling. In the summer time, the principal steam boats average from five to seven hundred passengers, and there is usually a considerable number to go ashore and come off at each place. A mile or two before reaching the spot, a negro makes the tour of the boat, with a large hand-bell, and, in an amusing speech, full of the idioms of his own race, announces the approach, and requests those who are going ashore to select their baggage. This done, the steamer, gliding over the smooth water at the rate of fifteen or twenty miles in the hour, sheers in toward the shore, and the small boat is lowered, with the captain in her at the helm; the passengers are put on board, and away she shoots at the end of a line gradually loosened, but still kept tight enough to send her, like an arrow to her mark. The moment she touches the pier, the loose line is let out from the steamer, which still keeps on her way, and between that moment and the exhaustion of the line, perhaps thirty seconds, the baggage is thrown out, and taken in, passengers jump ashore, and embark, and away shoots the little boat again, her bow rising clear over the crest of her own foam, with the added velocity of the steamer at full speed, and the rapid hauling in of the crew. I never have failed to observe a look of astonishment on the part of the subjects of this hurried transfer, however used to it by frequent repetition; and a long sigh of relief, as they look about on the broad and steady deck, or tread the ground beneath them if they have gone ashore, follows as invariably. As the boat is hauled up again, the negro crier reappears with his bell, and, looking the newly arrived group close in the face, cries out, as if they were a mile off, “All pas’ng’rs as hasn’t paid their passage, please walk to the cap’n’s office and settLE-E-E!!”—the whole sentence recited in the most monotonous tone till the last syllable, which rises suddenly to a ludicrous scream, prolonged as long as his breath will continue it.