After a while, we are rowed ashore with
them, in the same boat. Its crew are new hands, and therefore require
much instruction from the cockswain. We are seated under an awning. The
guns of the Cyane are medium thirty-two pounders; some of them have
percussion locks.
At the Tremont, I had Bridge to dine with me: iced champagne, claret
in glass pitchers. Nothing very remarkable among the guests. A
wine-merchant, French apparently, though he had arrived the day before
in a bark from Copenhagen: a somewhat corpulent gentleman, without so
good manners as an American would have in the same line of life, but
good-natured, sociable, and civil, complaining of the heat. He had rings
on his fingers of great weight of metal, and one of them had a seal for
letters; brooches at the bosom, three in a row, up and down; also a gold
watch-guard, with a seal appended. Talks of the comparative price of
living, of clothes, etc., here and in Europe. Tells of the prices of
wines by the cask and pipe. Champagne, he says, is drunk of better
quality here than where it grows.
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