ll that Life can offer--save to handle sweep again.

By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel,
By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal;
By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine,
I am paid in full for service--would that service still were mine!

* * * * *

It may be that Fate will give me life and leave to row once more--
Set some strong man free for fighting as I take awhile his oar.
But to-day I leave the galley. Shall I curse her service then?
God be thanked--whate'er comes after, I have lived and toiled with men!

VII

THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF

It was her first voyage, and though she was but a cargo-steamer of
twenty-five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the
outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework
and machinery; and her designers and owner thought as much of her as
though she had been the _Lucania_. Anyone can make a floating hotel
that will pay expenses, if he puts enough money into the saloon, and
charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in
these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a
cargo-boat must be built for cheapness, great hold-capacity, and a
certain steady speed. This boat was, perhaps, two hundred and forty
feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her
to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted
to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store
away in her holds. Her owners--they were a very well-known Scotch
firm--came round with her from the north, where she had been launched
and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo
for New York; and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro
on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass work, and the
patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which
she had cracked a bottle of champagne when she named the steamer the
_Dimbula_. It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all
her newness--she was painted lead-colour with a red funnel--looked
very fine indeed. Her house-flag was flying, and her whistle from time
to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she
was new to the High and Narrow Seas and wished to make her welcome.

"And now," said Miss Frazier, delighted