n crews an' owners, we were fond o' the auld Blind Deevil an'
his dog, an' I'm thinkin' he liked us. He was worth the windy side o'
twa million sterlin', an' no friend to his own blood-kin. Money's an
awfu' thing--overmuch--for a lonely man.

"I'd taken her out twice, there an' back again, when word came o' the
Breslau's breakdown, just as I prophesied. Calder was her engineer--he's
not fit to run a tug down the Solent--and he fairly lifted the engines
off the bed-plates, an' they fell down in heaps, by what I heard. So
she filled from the after stuffin'-box to the after bulkhead, an' lay
star-gazing, with seventy-nine squealin' passengers in the saloon, till
the Camaralzaman o' Ramsey & Gold's Cartagena line gave her a tow to
the tune o' five thousand seven hunder an' forty pound, wi' costs in the
Admiralty Court. She was helpless, ye'll understand, an' in no case
to meet ony weather. Five thousand seven hunder an' forty pounds, with
costs, an' exclusive o' new engines! They'd ha' done better to ha' kept
me on the old timin'.

"But, even so, the new Board were all for retrenchment. Young Steiner,
the Jew, was at the bottom of it. They sacked men right an' left, that
would not eat the dirt the Board gave 'em. They cut down repairs;
they fed crews wi' leavin's an' scrapin's; and, reversin', McRimmon's
practice, they hid their defeeciencies wi' paint an' cheap gildin'. Quem
Deus vult perrdere prrius dementat, ye remember.

"In January we went to dry-dock, an' in the next dock lay the Grotkau,
their big freighter that was the Dolabella o' Piegan, Piegan & Walsh's
line in '84--a Clyde-built iron boat, a flat-bottomed, pigeon-breasted,
under-engined, bull-nosed bitch of a five thousand ton freighter, that
would neither steer, nor steam, nor stop when ye asked her. Whiles
she'd attend to her helm, whiles she'd take charge, whiles she'd wait to
scratch herself, an' whiles she'd buttock into a dockhead. But Holdock
and Steiner had bought her cheap, and painted her all over like the Hoor
o' Babylon, an' we called her the Hoor for short." (By the way, McPhee
kept to that name throughout the rest of his tale; so you must read
accordingly.) "I went to see young Bannister--he had to take what the
Board gave him, an' he an' Calder were shifted together from the Breslau
to this abortion--an' talkin' to him I went into the dock under her.
Her plates were pitted till the men that were paint, paint, paintin' her
laughed at it. But the