Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the
chain, and run from home like a schoolboy?  I could not discover
which; but here at least he was out on the adventure, and still one
of the bravest and most youthful men on board.

'Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,' said he;
'but I can do a turn yet.'

And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to
support him?

'Oh yes,' he replied.  'But I'm never happy without a job on hand.
And I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything.  You see no craze about
me.'

This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
drunken father.  He was a capable man, with a good chance in life;
but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of
sherry, and involved his sons along with him in ruin.  Now they
were on board with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.

Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to
the most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could
have adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's
company.  I was, one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman,
running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste
for poetry and a genial sense of fun.  I had asked him his hopes in
emigrating.  They were like those of so many others, vague and
unfounded; times were bad at home; they were said to have a turn
for the better in the States; a man could get on anywhere, he
thought.  That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if
he could get on in America, why could he not do the same in
Scotland?  But I never had the courage to use that argument, though
it was often on the tip of my tongue, and instead I agreed with him
heartily adding, with reckless originality, 'If the man stuck to
his work, and kept away from drink.'

'Ah!' said he slowly, 'the drink!  You see, that's just my
trouble.'

He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the
same time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-
ashamed, half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be
beaten.  You would have said he recognised a destiny to which he
was born, and accepted the consequences mildly.  Like the merchant
Abudah, he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and
carrying it along with him, the whole at an expense of six guineas.

As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three
great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first
and foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to
me the silliest means of cure.  You cannot run away from a
weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be
so, why not now, and where you stand?  Coelum non animam.  Change
Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.  A
sea-voyage will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap
pleasure; emigration has to be done before we climb the vessel; an
aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to
be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible
than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul
tragically ship-wrecked.  In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure
is resorted to by way of anodyne.  The pleasure-seeker sets forth
upon life with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly
good and nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to
himself; and it is because all has failed in his celestial
enterprise that you now behold him rolling in the garbage.  Hence
the comparative success of the teetotal pledge; because to a man
who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in life.  Somewhat
as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the reformed
drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating
drinks, and may live for that negation.  There is something, at
least, NOT TO BE DONE each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every
evening.

We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under
the name Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of
the intelligence which here surrounded me.  Physically he was a
small Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already
carrying the elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat
marred by the smallness of his eyes.  Mentally, he was endowed
above the average.  There were but few subjects on which he could
not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering
himself slowly and with gusto like a man who enjoyed his own
sententiousness.  He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater, speaking
with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to launch and
emphasise an argument.  When he began a discussion, he could not
bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone,
without once relinquishing a point.  An engineer by trade, Mackay
believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the
human machine.  The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound
of carrion and perverse gases.  He had an appetite for disconnected
facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads.  What
is called information was indeed a passion with the man, and he not
only delighted to receive it, but could pay you back in kind.

With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer
young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money,
and but little hope.  He was almost tedious in the cynical
disclosures of his despair.  'The ship may go down for me,' he
would say, 'now or to-morrow.  I have nothing to lose and nothing
to hope.'  And again:  'I am sick of the whole damned performance.'
He was, like the kind little man, already quoted, another so-called
victim of the bottle.  But Mackay was miles from publishing his
weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt
masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one night
overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade.  It was
a treat to see him manage this:  the various jesters withered under
his gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely
force, and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation.  His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism.  He could see nothing
in the world but money and steam-engines.  He did not know what you
meant by the word happiness.  He had forgotten the simple emotions
of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.
He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it
had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to
liquor, was his god and guide.  One day he took me to task--novel
cry to me--upon the over-payment of literature.  Literary men, he
said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made
threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters,
except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the
while.  He produced a mere fancy article.  Mackay's notion of a
book was Hoppus's Measurer.  Now in my time I have possessed and
even studied that work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan
Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I should choose for my
companion volume.

I tried to fight the point with Mackay.  I made him own that he had
taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view,
insignificant; but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the
admission.  It was in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure
ready-made and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and
butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the
necessary food and leisure before they start upon the search for
pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such conclusions.  The thing
was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what
had to do with food.  'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom
and the top.'  By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much
interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
unnoticed and had to go without his tea.  He had enough sense and
humour, indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this
himself in private; and even to me he referred to it with the
shadow of a smile.

Mackay was a hot bigot.  He would not hear of religion.  I have
seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor
human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he
had had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a
matter as the riddler's definition of mind.  He snorted aloud with
zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.  Anything, whatever
it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued
passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a
conspiracy against the people.  Thus, when I put in the plea for
literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of
the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I
was in a different world from him.  'Damn my conduct!' said he.  'I
have given it up for a bad job.  My question is, "Can I drive a
nail?"' And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-
engines.

It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of
culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life not only
exaggerates to a man the importance of material conditions, but
indirectly, by denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps
his mind ignorant of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this
overwhelming concern about diet, and hence the bald view of
existence professed by Mackay.  Had this been an English peasant
the conclusion would be tenable.  But Mackay had most of the
elements of a liberal education.  He had skirted metaphysical and
mathematical studies.  He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew,
which would be exceptional among bankers.  He had been brought up
in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous pride,
the story of his own brother's deathbed ecstasies.  Yet he had
somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a dead thing
among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or
shaping aim.  And further, there seemed a tendency among many of
his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions.  One
thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the
way to be happy.  Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps
two-thirds of morality.  Can it be that the Puritan school, by
divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and
setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human
activity and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?

Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple
pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an
Irishman who based his claim to the widest and most affectionate
popularity precisely upon these two qualities, that he was natural
and happy.  He boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure,
unquenchable gaiety, and indefatigable goodwill.  His clothes
puzzled the diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once a
private coachman, when they became eloquent and seemed a part of
his biography.  His face contained the rest, and, I fear, a
prophecy of the future; the hawk's nose above accorded so ill with
the pink baby's mouth below.  His spirit and his pride belonged,
you might say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness
expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation to
situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship.  Barney ate,
so to speak, nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter, and eggs
supported him throughout the voyage; and about mealtime you might
often find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery.  His was the
first voice heard singing among all the passengers; he was the
first who fell to dancing.  From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there
was not a piece of fun undertaken but there was Barney in the
midst.

You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our
concerts--his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet
shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement-
-and to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and
earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each
song to a conclusion.  He was not only a great favourite among
ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who
often leaned to hear him over the rails of the hurricane-deck.  He
was somewhat pleased, but not at all abashed, by this attention;
and one night, in the midst of his famous performance of 'Billy
Keogh,' I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an
audacious wink to an old gentleman above.

This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.

He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the
passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his
innocent freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin
where politeness must be natural to walk without a fall.  He was
once seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because
they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious
Catholic.  He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when,
late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman
struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately
missing from the group.  His taste was for the society of
gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack
in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough
and positive with a girlish shrinking.  Mackay, partly from his
superior powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible,
partly from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the
Irishman.  I have seen him slink off with backward looks of terror
and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had
been professing hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical
readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot.  These utterances hurt the
little coachman's modesty like a bad word.


THE SICK MAN


One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-
in-arm and briskly up and down the deck.  Six bells had rung; a
head-wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a
sprinkle of rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now
divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull,
thrilling and intense like a mosquito.  Even the watch lay
somewhere snugly out of sight.

For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud.  We ran
to the rails.  An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it
was impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his
belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread
toes.  We asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently,
with a strange accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he
had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen
the doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue till he
was overmastered and had fallen where we found him.

Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to
seek the doctor.  We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there
came no reply; nor could we find any one to guide us.  It was no
time for delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up
a ladder and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed
him as politely as I could -

'I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in
the lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor.'

He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat
harshly, 'Well, _I_ can't leave the bridge, my man,' said he.

'No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,' I returned.

'Is it one of the crew?' he asked.

'I believe him to be a fireman,' I replied.

I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or
from something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question
was immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice
much freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward and
despatch him in quest of the doctor, who would now be in the
smoking-room over his pipe.

One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour
down our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room
of a night.  Let me call him Blackwood.  O'Reilly and I rattled
down the companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and
perched across the carpenters bench upon one thigh, found
Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead
of an eye and a rank twang in his speech.  I forget who was with
him, but the pair were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes.
I dare say he was tired with his day's work, and eminently
comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did not stop to
consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.

'Steward,' said I, 'there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't
find the doctor.'

He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that
is the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth -

'That's none of my business,' said he.  'I don't care.'

I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat.  The
thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with
indignation.  I glanced at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and
looked like assault and battery, every inch of him.  But we had a
better card than violence.

'You will have to make it your business,' said I, 'for I am sent to
you by the officer on the bridge.'

Blackwood was fairly tripped.  He made no answer, but put out his
pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand
strolling.  From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me
in courtesy, as though he had repented his evil speech and were
anxious to leave a better impression.

When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and
two or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
suggestions.  One proposed to give the patient water, which was
promptly negatived.  Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed
to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the
streaming decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between us.  It was
only by main force that we did so, and neither an easy nor an
agreeable duty; for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened
child, and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our
control.

'O let me lie!' he pleaded.  'I'll no' get better anyway.'  And
then, with a moan that went to my heart, 'O why did I come upon
this miserable journey?'

I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before
in the close, tossing steerage:  'O why left I my hame?'

Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to
the galley, where we could see a light.  There he found a belated
cook scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of
these he sought to borrow.  The scullion was backward.  'Was it one
of the crew?' he asked.  And when Jones, smitten with my theory,
had assured him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his
scouring and came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the
lanterns swinging from his finger.  The light, as it reached the
spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years;
but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the
expression and even the design of his face.

So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.

'IT'S ONLY A PASSENGER!' said he; and turning about, made, lantern
and all, for the galley.

'He's a man anyway,' cried Jones in indignation.

'Nobody said he was a woman,' said a gruff voice, which I
recognised for that of the bo's'un.

All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and
now the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the
hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor were not yet come.  We told him
not.

'No?' he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry
aft in person.

Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately
enough and examined our patient with the lantern.  He made little
of the case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him,
and sent him forward to his bunk.  Two of his neighbours in the
steerage had now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow
that such 'a fine cheery body' should be sick; and these, claiming
a sort of possession, took him entirely under their own care.  The
drug had probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was
led along plaintive and patient, but protesting.  His heart
recoiled at the thought of the steerage.  'O let me lie down upon
the bieldy side,' he cried; 'O dinna take me down!'  And again:  'O
why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?'  And yet once
more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word:
'I had no CALL to come.'  But there he was; and by the doctor's
orders and the kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the
companion of Steerage No.1 into the den allotted him.

At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood,
Jones and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk.  This last was a
gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a
century upon the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy
blond eyebrows, and an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady
and hard.  I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered
also that he had helped us about the lantern; and now seeing him in
conversation with Jones, and being choked with indignation, I
proceeded to blow off my steam.

'Well,' said I, 'I make you my compliments upon your steward,' and
furiously narrated what had happened.

'I've nothing to do with him,' replied the bo's'un.  'They're all
alike.  They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon
the top of another.'

This was enough.  A very little humanity went a long way with me
after the experience of the evening.  A sympathy grew up at once
between the bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next
few days, I learned to appreciate him better.  He was a remarkable
type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books.  He had
been at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States
ship, 'after the Alabama, and praying God we shouldn't find her.'
He was a high Tory and a high Englishman.  No manufacturer could
have held opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes.
'The workmen,' he said, 'think nothing of their country.  They
think of nothing but themselves.  They're damned greedy, selfish
fellows.'  He would not hear of the decadence of England.  'They
say they send us beef from America,' he argued; 'but who pays for
it?  All the money in the world's in England.'  The Royal Navy was
the best of possible services, according to him.  'Anyway the
officers are gentlemen,' said he; 'and you can't get hazed to death
by a damned non-commissioned--as you can in the army.'  Among
nations, England was the first; then came France.  He respected the
French navy and liked the French people; and if he were forced to
make a new choice in life, 'by God, he would try Frenchmen!'  For
all his looks and rough, cold manners, I observed that children
were never frightened by him; they divined him at once to be a
friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and clothes, it
was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his
boyish monkey trick.

In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man.  I was afraid
I should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the
lantern; and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots,
English, or Irish.  He had certainly employed north-country words
and elisions; but the accent and the pronunciation seemed
unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear.

To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an
adventure that required some nerve.  The stench was atrocious; each
respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese;
and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many
people worming themselves into their clothes in twilight of the
bunks.  You may guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for
myself also, when I heard that the sick man was better and had gone
on deck.

The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with
pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and
intermittent; and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just
beginning to wash down the decks.  But for a sick man this was
heaven compared to the steerage.  I found him standing on the hot-
water pipe, just forward of the saloon deck house.  He was smaller
than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but his face was
distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey from a
distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and
grains of gold.  His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain;
and I soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk.  His
accent and language had been formed in the most natural way, since
he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the
banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.  A fisherman in the
season, he had fished the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby.
When the season was over, and the great boats, which required extra
hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next spring, he worked
as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the wharves
unloading vessels.  In this comparatively humble way of life he had
gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable house,
his hayfield, and his garden.  On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present
on a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.

Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the
steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a
ham and tea and a spice loaf.  But he laughed to scorn such
counsels.  'I'm not afraid,' he had told his adviser; 'I'll get on
for ten days.  I've not been a fisherman for nothing.'  For it is
no light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps
waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles
on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with
only here and there an anchorage where you dare not lie, or a
harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.  The life of
a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work
and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky
and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop
will give him credit for a loaf of bread.  Yet the steerage of the
emigrant ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus
rudely trained.  He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until
the day before, when his appetite was tempted by some excellent
pea-soup.  We were all much of the same mind on board, and
beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too
well; only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps because
he was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal had
resulted in a cramp.  He had determined to live henceforth on
biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England,
to make the passage by saloon.  The second cabin, after due
inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the steerage.

He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill.  'Ye see, I had no
call to be here,' said he; 'and I thought it was by with me last
night.  I've a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I
had no real call to leave them.'  Speaking of the attentions he had
received from his shipmates generally, 'they were all so kind,' he
said, 'that there's none to mention.'  And except in so far as I
might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to my
services.

But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of
this day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the
States, and preparing to return in the saloon, and the new
testimony rendered by his story, not so much to the horrors of the
steerage as to the habitual comfort of the working classes.  One
foggy, frosty December evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill,
near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging homeward from the
fields.  Our roads lay together, and it was natural that we should
fall into talk.  He was covered with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant
creature, who thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret contrivance
of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and I
confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
pounds in the bank.  But this man had travelled over most of the
world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American
railroad, with two dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at
night; whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and
had made all that he possessed in that same accursed, down-falling
England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and
carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.

Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and
hard times.  Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost
in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and
held strong opinions on the subject.  He spoke sharply of the
masters, and, when I led him on, of the men also.  The masters had
been selfish and obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-
headed.  He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had
been present, and the somewhat long discourse which he had there
pronounced, calling into question the wisdom and even the good
faith of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself
through flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided
purse, he had so little faith in either man or master, and so
profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs,
that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden
and complete political subversion.  Down must go Lords and Church
and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands
from worse to better, or England stood condemned.  Such principles,
he said, were growing 'like a seed.'

From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
ominous and grave.  I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and
fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men.  This man was
calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the
policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this
was his panacea,--to rend the old country from end to end, and from
top to bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the
hand of violence.


THE STOWAWAYS


On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our
companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure.  He wore
tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain
smoking-cap.  His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly
enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly
degeneration had already overtaken his features.  The fine nose had
grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat.
His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently
varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but
perfectly presentable.  The lad who helped in the second cabin told
me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but
thought, 'by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite,
that he was some one from the saloon.'

I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his
air and bearing.  He might have been, I thought, the son of some
good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from
home.  But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk!  I
wish you could have heard hin, tell his own stories.  They were so
swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated
here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could
only lose in any reproduction.  There were tales of the P. and O.
Company, where he had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in
former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where
he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides of life,
each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait.  He had the
talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen.  The
best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society;
there they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know
Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a
frank, headlong power of style, and a broad, human choice of
subject, that would have turned any circle in the world into a
circle of hearers.  He was a Homeric talker, plain, strong, and
cheerful; and the things and the people of which he spoke became
readily and clearly present to the minds of those who heard him.
This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade,
must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of
duchesses and hostlers.

Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
in his narration.  The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the
sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in
particular, one among ten thousand.  It sounded so far exactly like
an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had
imagined.  But then there came incidents more doubtful, which
showed an almost impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly
impudent disregard for truth.  And then there was the tale of his
departure.  He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine
day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a spree.  I have a
suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but God disposes
all things; and one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom should
he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at
first!  What followed?  He himself indicated cavalierly that he had
then resigned.  Let us put it so.  But these resignations are
sometimes very trying.

At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself
away from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he
was.  'That?' said Mackay.  'Why, that's one of the stowaways.'

'No man,' said the same authority, 'who has had anything to do with
the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.'  I give the
statement as Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to
believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the
man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even
pass for a fair representation of the facts.  We gentlemen of
England who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient
ideas on the subject.  All the world over, people are stowing away
in coal-holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea,
appearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck.  The career of
these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adventurous.  They may be
poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of
concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once and
ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised
land, the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same
way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to
the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail.  Since I
crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a dying
state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and departed for a
farther country than America.

When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray
for:  that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his
forgiveness.  After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels
himself as secure as if he had paid for his passage.  It is not
altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more or less
efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and
every now and again find themselves better paid than by a whole
family of cabin passengers.  Not long ago, for instance, a packet
was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and courage of a
stowaway engineer.  As was no more than just, a handsome
subscription rewarded him for his success:  but even without such
exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and America,
the stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure.
Four engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship, the
Circassia; and before two days after their arrival each of the four
had found a comfortable berth.  This was the most hopeful tale of
emigration that I heard from first to last; and as you see, the
luck was for stowaways.

My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next
morning, as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to
find the ex-Royal Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint
of a deck house.  There was another fellow at work beside him, a
lad not more than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his
handsome face sown with grains of beauty and lighted up by
expressive eyes.  Four stowaways had been found aboard our ship
before she left the Clyde, but these two had alone escaped the
ignominy of being put ashore.  Alick, my acquaintance of last
night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical engineer; the
other was from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast.
Two people more unlike by training, character, and habits it would
be hard to imagine; yet here they were together, scrubbing paint.

Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
opportunities in life.  I have heard him end a story with these
words:  'That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses.'
Situation after situation failed him; then followed the depression
of trade, and for months he had hung round with other idlers,
playing marbles all day in the West Park, and going home at night
to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job.  I believe
this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he
might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but
he had a comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive.  This
fellow was continually threatening to slip his cable for the
States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her
Brown.  Some months afterwards, Alick met another old chum in
Sauchiehall Street.

'By the bye, Alick,' said he, 'I met a gentleman in New York who
was asking for you.'

'Who was that?' asked Alick.

'The new second engineer on board the So-and-so,' was the reply.

'Well, and who is he?'

'Brown, to be sure.'

For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
Circassia.  If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought
it was high time to follow Brown's example.  He spent his last day,
as he put it, 'reviewing the yeomanry,' and the next morning says
he to his landlady, 'Mrs. X., I'll not take porridge to-day,
please; I'll take some eggs.'

'Why, have you found a job?' she asked, delighted.

'Well, yes,' returned the perfidious Alick; 'I think I'll start to-
day.'

And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America.  I am
afraid that landlady has seen the last of him.

It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a
vessel's departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No.
1, flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage
from the Broomielaw to Greenock.  That night, the ship's yeoman
pulled him out by the heels and had him before the mate.  Two other
stowaways had already been found and sent ashore; but by this time
darkness had fallen, they were out in the middle of the estuary,
and the last steamer had left them till the morning.

'Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,' said the mate,
'and see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow.'

In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest, and
breakfast; and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was
over and the game up for good with that ship, when one of the
sailors grumbled out an oath at him, with a 'What are you doing
there?' and 'Do you call that hiding, anyway?'  There was need of
no more; Alick was in another bunk before the day was older.
Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was cursorily
inspected.  He heard the round come down the companion and look
into one pen after another, until they came within two of the one
in which he lay concealed.  Into these last two they did not enter,
but merely glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he was
personally favoured in this escape.  It was the character of the
man to attribute nothing to luck and but little to kindness;
whatever happened to him he had earned in his own right amply;
favours came to him from his singular attraction and adroitness,
and misfortunes he had always accepted with his eyes open.  Half an
hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage began to fill
with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick's troubles was
at an end.  He was soon making himself popular, smoking other
people's tobacco, and politely sharing their private stock
delicacies, and when night came he retired to his bunk beside the
others with composure.

Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and
only the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick
appeared on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate.  As a matter
of fact, he was known to several on board, and even intimate with
one of the engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of such
occasions for the authorities to avow their information.  Every one
professed surprise and anger on his appearance, and he was led
prison before the captain.

'What have you got to say for yourself?' inquired the captain.

'Not much,' said Alick; 'but when a man has been a long time out of
a job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances.'

'Are you willing to work?'

Alick swore he was burning to be useful.

'And what can you do?' asked the captain.

He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.

'I think you will be better at engineering?' suggested the officer,
with a shrewd look.

'No, sir,' says Alick simply.--'There's few can beat me at a lie,'
was his engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.

'Have you been to sea?' again asked the captain.

'I've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more,' replied
the unabashed Alick.

'Well, we must try and find some work for you,' concluded the
officer.

And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily
scraping paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet.  'You
leave me alone,' was his deduction.  'When I get talking to a man,
I can get round him.'

The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian--it was
noticeable that neither of them told his name--had both been
brought up and seen the world in a much smaller way.  His father, a
confectioner, died and was closely followed by his mother.  His
sisters had taken, I think, to dressmaking.  He himself had
returned from sea about a year ago and gone to live with his
brother, who kept the 'George Hotel'--'it was not quite a real
hotel,' added the candid fellow--'and had a hired man to mind the
horses.'  At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went
on his brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began
to find himself one too many at the 'George Hotel.'  'I don't think
brothers care much for you,' he said, as a general reflection upon
life.  Hurt at this change, nearly penniless, and too proud to ask
for more, he set off on foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth,
living on the journey as he could.  He would have enlisted, but he
was too small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought
himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trading dandy.
Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy sprung a leak and went
down; and though the crew were picked up and brought ashore by
fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but the clothes upon
their back.  His next engagement was scarcely better starred; for
the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so heartily
during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the entire crew
deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.

Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian.  He could find no
berth in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a
steamer.  She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday:  the Devonian
had a bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to
provide against the future, and set off along the quays to seek
employment.  But he was now not only penniless, his clothes had
begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street
Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in
that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man.
You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole
in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck.  The
Devonian lost heart at so many refusals.  He had not the impudence
to beg; although, as he said, 'when I had money of my own, I always
gave it.'  It was only on Saturday morning, after three whole days
of starvation, that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of
her own accord a glass of milk.  He had now made up his mind to
stow away, not from any desire to see America, but merely to obtain
the comfort of a place in the forecastle and a supply of familiar
sea-fare.  He lived by begging, always from milkwomen, and always
scones and milk, and was not once refused.  It was vile wet
weather, and he could never have been dry.  By night he walked the
streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow Green, and heard, in the
intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of the spot clear
up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the merits of the
clergy.  He had not much instruction; he could 'read bills on the
street,' but was 'main bad at writing'; yet these theologians seem
to have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement.  Why he
did not go to the Sailors' House I know not; I presume there is in
Glasgow one of these institutions, which are by far the happiest
and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand
to my author, as they say in old books, and relate the story as I
heard it.  In the meantime, he had tried four times to stow away in
different vessels, and four times had been discovered and handed
back to starvation.  The fifth time was lucky; and you may judge if
he were pleased to be aboard ship again, at his old work, and with
duff twice a week.  He was, said Alick, 'a devil for the duff.'  Or
if devil was not the word, it was one if anything stronger.

The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable.  The
Devonian was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the
first, pulled his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found
work for himself when there was none to show him.  Alick, on the
other hand, was not only a skulker in the brain, but took a
humorous and fine gentlemanly view of the transaction.  He would
speak to me by the hour in ostentatious idleness; and only if the
bo's'un or a mate came by, fell-to languidly for just the necessary
time till they were out of sight. 'I'm not breaking my heart with
it,' he remarked.

Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
'Hullo,' said he,  'here's some real work coming--I'm off,' and he
was gone that moment.  Again, calculating the six guinea passage-
money, and the probable duration of the passage, he remarked
pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day for this job,
'and it's pretty dear to the company at that.'  'They are making
nothing by me,' was another of his observations; 'they're making
something by that fellow.'  And he pointed to the Devonian, who was
just then busy to the eyes.

The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned
to despise him.  His natural talents were of no use either to
himself or others; for his character had degenerated like his face,
and become pulpy and pretentious.  Even his power of persuasion,
which was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being
lost or neutralised by over-confidence.  He lied in an aggressive,
brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain
of his own cleverness that he could not refrain from boasting, ten
minutes after, of the very trick by which he had deceived you.
'Why, now I have more money than when I came on board,' he said one
night, exhibiting a sixpence, 'and yet I stood myself a bottle of
beer before I went to bed yesterday.  And as for tobacco, I have
fifteen sticks of it.'  That was fairly successful indeed; yet a
man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might,
who knows? have got the length of half a crown.  A man who prides
himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of
silence, above all as to his own misdeeds.  It is only in the farce
and for dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar
talents to the world at large.

Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick;
for at the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense
of humour that moved you to forgive him.  It was more than half a
jest that he conducted his existence.  'Oh, man,' he said to me
once with unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, 'I
would give up anything for a lark.'