The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

520

520 THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

exploring, and is from the first an object of "intense interest.
I never wearied of studying its conveniences and elaborate
arrangements. The ocean itself seemed to me more grand
and vast than I had ever imagined, although I was born and
reared on its shores. It was a watery highway through
which our steamer glided like a fish, at a speed of four or
five hundred miles a day. I had started with something of
terror at the thought of crossing the trackless ocean; but in
less than twenty-four hours my fears were gone. And I
laughed as I recalled Mark Twain's declaration, that it is
"safer to live on a~ Cunard steamer than on shore, since
people are dying all the time on shore, while no Cunarder
has lost a passenger since the steamship company was
organized."
The eternal vigilance that is the law of the ship impressed me greatly. All through the day I saw the captain
on the bridge, the helmsman at the wheel, and I heard the
constant piping of the boatswain's whistle calling the men
to duty, to which they promptly responded. I plucked up
courage to accompany my husband "1down below," where,
amid fire and smoke, heat, soot, and noise, a little army of
men bestowed on the monster engines more than a mother's
devotion, and could not be enticed from their duty for a
moment, by the strongest temptation they know, - the
promise of a dram. All through the dense fog I heard the
incessant bellowing of the steam whistle, uttering its hoarse
warning to the ships that might be in our pathway, and,
through the night as through the day, alike in calm weather
and tempest, I heard the ship's bells ring out the hour, and
the response in sonorous tones of the night watchman, "All's