THE NIGHT BOAT.

By George W. Hilton'46. With ornamentation from American Steam Vessels (1895) by Samuel WardStanton. Berkeley: Howell North Books,1968. 271 pp. With 55 Stanton drawings,495 illustrations, 2 in full color. $12.50.

"All this luxury costs only three cents a mile," observed a Scottish tourist of the 1870's; and, forgetting money, he grew lyrical about "the whole vessel being brightly lighted up." He was agreeably titillated when seven officers in uniform, gold lace, and dressed boots received him on board. When he disembarked, porters in white gloves waited to open his carriage doors. The Bristol of the Fall River Line steaming off punctually achieved the speed of a railroad train, 20 miles an hour. Delmonico's in New York had bled him, but in the steamer's sumptuous dining room he found, reasonably priced, "every delicacy of the season." Finally he "retired" to his "chamber" to be "lulled to sleep by the almost noiseless sweep of the vessel on the water and the sweet low strains of a distant orchestra."

This book might even make a young passenger on a jet flight wish that he had been born back in the Victorian or Edwardian period. Night boats then served with elegance and grace the thousands who revelled in the slow motion of ocean and river, moonlight and music.

Professor Hilton of UCLA is a veteran rail and marine writer, who was Chairman of President Johnson's Task Force on Transportation Policy and Consultant to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on Transportation Projects in South Africa and Italy. He is now Acting Curator of Land Transportation at the Smithsonian Institution. A formidable economist, he could have buried us under a million meticulously documented facts. But no, the volume is "a fond farewell to a vanished institution."

In 1969 with spiralling costs, one may hard-headedly regret the passing of night boats, so kind to the wallet. As late as the 1930's, the Colonial Line's rate was only $3 between New York and Providence; $5, round trip; plus $1 to $3 for a cabin in each direction. Even in late 1961, the Old Bay State Line asked only $5.80 fare between Baltimore and Norfolk; cabins $2 to $6.25. For two nights between San Francisco and San Diego you could breathe ocean air, dine, lounge in spacious saloons dance, walk the decks, and sleep in a berth for only $31 round trip on the Yale or Harvard, "twin palaces of the Pacific."

Charles Dickens was not pleased with American men who chewed tobacco and spit and wore their shoes in bed. On the New World, in contrast, a Scandinavian woman was charmed. This Hudson River night boat "was really a little floating palace, splendid and glittering with white and gold on the outside, splendid and elegant within: large saloons, magnificent furniture, where ladies and gentlemen reclined comfortably talking or reading the newspapers. I saw : here none of Dickens's smoking and spitting gentlemen. We floated proudly and smoothly on the broad magnificent Hudson."

When the City of Norfolk, surviving 20 years longer than others, tied up in Baltimore April 14, 1962, the institution of the American night boat was no more. Paralleling waterways are interstate highways on which automobiles zoom at 70 miles an hour. But in the realms of memory, with Captain Hilton at the helm, the night boat sails on forever.