DELAWARE RIVER--DAYS AND NIGHTS
_April 5, 1879_.-With the return of spring to the skies, airs, waters
of the Delaware, return the sea-gulls. I never tire of watching their
broad and easy flight, in spirals, or as they oscillate with slow
unflapping wings, or look down with curved beak, or dipping to the
water after food. The crows, plenty enough all through the winter,
have vanish'd with the ice. Not one of them now to be seen. The
steamboats have again come forth--bustling up, handsome, freshly
painted, for summer work--the Columbia, the Edwin Forrest, (the
Republic not yet out,) the Reybold, Nelly White, the Twilight, the
Ariel, the Warner, the Perry, the Taggart, the Jersey Blue--even the
hulky old Trenton--not forgetting those saucy little bull-pups of the
current, the steamtugs.
But let me bunch and catalogue the affair--the river itself, all the
way from the sea--Cape island on one side and Henlopen light on the
other--up the broad bay north, and so to Philadelphia, and on further
to Trenton;--the sights I am most familiar with, (as I live a good
part of the time in Camden, I view matters from that outlook)--the
great arrogant, black, full-freighted ocean steamers, inward
or outward bound--the ample width here between the two cities,
intersected by Windmill island--an occasional man-of-war, sometimes a
foreigner, at anchor, with her guns and port-holes, and the boats,
and the brown-faced sailors, and the regular oar-strokes, and the gay
crowds of "visiting day"--the frequent large and handsome three-masted
schooners, (a favorite style of marine build, hereabout of late
years,) some of them new and very jaunty, with their white-gray sails
and yellow pine spars--the sloops dashing along in a fair wind--(I
see one now, coming up, under broad canvas, her gaff-topsail shining
in the sun, high and picturesque--what a thing of beauty amid the sky
and waters!)--the crowded wharf-slips along the city--the flags of
different nationalities, the sturdy English cross on its ground of
blood, the French tricolor, the banner of the great North German
empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors--sometimes, of an
afternoon, the whole scene enliven'd by a fleet of yachts, in a half
calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester;--the
neat, rakish, revenue steamer "Hamilton" in mid-stream, with her
perpendicular stripes flaunting aft--and, turning the eyes north, the
long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching
far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally across from the Kensington or
Richmond shores, in the west-by-south-west wind.
Pages:
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215