"BREAD UPON THE WATERS"
Atlantic winter weather. Ye ken what that means? McRimmon an' the Black Bird Line, God bless him!
Oh, I forgot to say she would lie down an' fill her forward deck green, an' snore away into a twenty-knot gale forty-five to the minute, three an' a half knots an hour, the engines runnin' sweet an' true as a bairn breathin' in its sleep. Bell was skipper; an' forbye there 's no love lost between 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
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