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“What’s that! what’s that!” flies from mouth to mouth; and forthwith they proceed to awaken their respective relations. “Mother! Aunt Hannah! do wake up; what is this awful noise?” “O, only a lock!” “Pray be still,” groan out the sleepy members from below.

“A lock!” exclaim the vivacious creatures, ever on the alert for information; “and what is a lock, pray?”

“Don’t you know what a lock is, you silly creatures? Do lie down and go to sleep.”

“But say, there ain’t any danger in a lock, is there?” respond the querists. “Danger!” exclaims a deaf old lady, poking up her head; “what’s the matter? There hain’t nothin’ burst, has there?” “No, no, no!” exclaim the provoked and despairing opposition party, who find that there is no such thing as going to sleep till they have made the old lady below and the young ladies above understand exactly the philosophy of a lock. After a while the conversation again subsides; again all is still; you hear only the trampling of horses and the rippling of the rope in the water, and sleep again is stealing over you. You doze, you dream, and all of a sudden you are started by a cry, “Chambermaid! wake up the lady that wants to be set ashore.” Up jumps chambermaid, and up jump the lady and two children, and forthwith form a committee of inquiry as to ways and means. “Where’s my bonnet?” says the lady, half awake, and fumbling among the various articles of that name. “I thought I hung it up behind the door.” “Can’t you find it?” says poor chambermaid, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “O, yes, here it is,” says the lady; and then the cloak, the shawl, the gloves, the shoes, receive each a separate discussion. At last all seems ready, and they begin to move off, when, lo! Peter’s cap is missing. “Now, where can it be?” soliloquizes the lady. “I put it right here by the table leg; maybe it got into some of the berths.” At this suggestion, the chambermaid takes the candle, and goes round deliberately to every berth, poking the light directly in the face of every sleeper. “Here it is,” she exclaims, pulling at something black under one pillow. “No, indeed, those are my shoes,” says the vexed sleeper. “Maybe it’s here,” she resumes, darting upon something dark in another berth. “No, that’s my bag,” responds the occupant. The chambermaid then proceeds to turn over all the children on the floor, to see if it is not under them. In the course of which process they are most agreeably waked up and enlivened; and when every body is broad awake, and most uncharitably wishing the cap, and Peter too, at the bottom of the canal, the good lady exclaims, “Well, if this isn’t lucky; here I had it safe in my basket all the time!” And she departs amid the–what shall I say?–execrations?–of the whole company, ladies though they be.

Well, after this follows a hushing up and wiping up among the juvenile population, and a series of remarks commences from the various shelves, of a very edifying and instructive tendency. One says that the woman did not seem to know where any thing was; another says that she has waked them all up; a third adds that she has waked up all the children, too; and the elderly ladies make moral reflections on the importance of putting your things where you can find them–being always ready; which observations, being delivered in an exceedingly doleful and drowsy tone, form a sort of sub-bass to the lively chattering of the upper shelfites, who declare that they feel quite wide awake,–that they don’t think they shall go to sleep again to-night,–and discourse over every thing in creation, until you heartily wish you were enough related to them to give them a scolding.

At last, however, voice after voice drops off; you fall into a most refreshing slumber; it seems to you that you sleep about a quarter of an hour, when the chambermaid pulls you by the sleeve. “Will you please to get up, ma’am? We want to make the beds.” You start and stare. Sure enough, the night is gone. So much for sleeping on board canal boats.

Let us not enumerate the manifold perplexities of the morning toilet in a place where every lady realizes most forcibly the condition of the old woman who lived under a broom: “All she wanted was elbow room.” Let us not tell how one glass is made to answer for thirty fair faces, one ewer and vase for thirty lavations; and–tell it not in Gath!–one towel for a company! Let us not intimate how ladies’ shoes have, in a night, clandestinely slid into the gentlemen’s cabin, and gentlemen’s boots elbowed, or, rather, toed their way among ladies’ gear, nor recite the exclamations after runaway property that are heard. “I can’t find nothin’ of Johnny’s shoe!” “Here’s a shoe in the water pitcher–is this it?” “My side combs are gone!” exclaims a nymph with dishevelled curls. “Massy! do look at my bonnet!” exclaims an old lady, elevating an article crushed into as many angles as there are pieces in a minced pie. “I never did sleep so much together in my life,” echoes a poor little French lady, whom despair has driven into talking English.

But our shortening paper warns us not to prolong our catalogue of distresses beyond reasonable bounds, and therefore we will close with advising all our friends, who intend to try this way of travelling for pleasure, to take a good stock both of patience and clean towels with them, for we think that they will find abundant need for both.