e could learn the amount of her fortune, she could let
Mrs. Frayling learn the amount of it too--just casually, in the course of
conversation, and then--Everyone said Mrs. Frayling was doing her best to
"place" her cousin-by-marriage, to secure him a well-endowed wife.

CHAPTER X

WHICH IT IS TO BE FEARED SMELLS SOMEWHAT POWERFULLY OF BILGE WATER

Warm wind, hot sun, the confused sound and movement of a great southern
port, all the traffic and trade of it, man and beast sweating in the
splendid glare. Rattle of cranes, scream of winches, grind of wheels, and
the bellowing of a big steamer, working her way cautiously through the
packed shipping of the basin, to the blue freedom of the open sea.--Such
was the scene which the boatswain and white-jacketed steward, leaning
their folded arms on the bulwarks and smoking, lazily watched.

The _Forest Queen_ rode high at the quayside, having discharged much, and
taken on but a moderate amount of cargo for her homeward voyage. This was
already stowed. She had coaled and was bound to clear by dawn. Now she
rested in idleness, most of her crew taking their pleasure ashore, a
Sabbath calm pervading her amid the strident activities going forward on
every hand. The ship's dog, a curly-haired black retriever, lay on the
clean deck in the sunshine stretched on his side, all four legs limp,
save when, pestered beyond endurance, he whisked into a sitting position
to snap at the all too numerous flies.

The boatswain--a heavily built East Anglian, born within sight of Boston
Stump five-and-forty years ago, his face seamed and pitted by smallpox
almost to the extinction of expression and altogether to that of
eyebrows, eyelashes and continuity of beard--spat deliberately and
voluminously into the oily, refuse-stained water, lapping against the
ship's side over twenty feet below, and resumed a desultory conversation
which for the moment had fallen dead.

"So that's the reason of his giving us hell's delight, like he has all
day, cleaning up?--Got a lady coming aboard to tea has he? If she's too
fine to take us as we are, a deal better let 'er stay ashore, in my
opinion. Stuff a' nonsense all this set out, dressing up and dressing
down. Vanity at the bottom of it--and who's it to take in?--For a tramp's
a tramp, and a liner's a liner; and all the water in God's ocean, and all
the rubbing and scrubbing on man's earth, won't convert the one into the
other, bless you."

He pointed