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  9
"He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time we
discovered he did not even know that ships had names--'like Christian
people'; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he beheld
the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air
of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And
probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled
together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth
of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary
to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the
'tweendeck and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber
dwelling--he would say--with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in
his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very
cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden boxes where
people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all ways
at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid down
there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before,
keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children
cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place
creaked, and everything was being shaken so that in one's little box one
dared not lift one's head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a
young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great
noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell--boom! boom! An awful
sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his
prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening.
It seemed always to be night in that place.
"Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track.
He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it,
and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly
round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand
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