A Trip Home, with Some Home-Spun Yarns

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: cent woods of Mount Edgecombe, whilst ever and anon the attention is attracted by the movements of the shipping, to be recalled occasionally by the marching of a guard across the Hoe between the barracks at Stonehouse and the citadel. The panorama is really perfect, and most fascinating. I had the advantage too of a cicerone who was well acquainted with the locality, and entered most enthusiastically upon its merits. He had been a great traveller, but declared he knew nothing, save the Bay of Naples, so beautiful or so interesting as Plymouth Sou.nl. His friend was of a somewhat graver turn, but of a most agreeable deportment. Looking at the Australian emigration ships as we sat upon one of the stone benches, he said with a sigh, Ah! those ships could tell many a tale of woe if they could speak and reveal the ' secrets of the prison-house.' I observed, I thought they were for the transport of voluntary emigrants. Why, yes, he said, they are not filled with convicts it is true, but I believe you would not find that many of the passengers are obeying the dictates of their inclination, hardly of their free will, when they step on board the vessel which is to convey them to an unknown land far away from that country which holds all that they love, and venerate, and cherish. Some indeed, no doubt, emigrate in order that they may hasten to be rich; some from restlessness, and some from recklessness; but the majority, be assured, leave the land of their nativity as reluctantly and as much upon constraint of one kind or another as if they were shipped by the sentence of the judge; their Hiiibs, indeed, are free, but their motions are constrained: the iron chafes not their skin, but it enters into their soul. Few there are on board those vessels, I am sure, to whose ears ...