There are some minds so base, that they only require a combination of circumstances, to show to what depths of meanness they can stoop. Mr. Lootie's was a mind of this class. He felt no remorse in replenishing his pockets from the scanty resources of these poor emigrants, joining in the lowest species of gambling in order to win their money, part of which, as a sort of excuse to himself, he expended in liquor, in order to reconcile his victims to their loss; for, with very few exceptions, he was always the winner. Even the solitary sixpence, the sole fortune of the brothers Muckleroy, found its way into the pocket of the rapacious defaulter. Flora watched these proceedings until she could control her indignation no longer, and accosting Mr. Lootie on deck, she remonstrated with him on his immoral and most ungentlemanly conduct. He replied, with a sneer, "They were fools. He had as much right to take advantage of their folly as another. Some one would win their money if he did not. The people were hungry and disappointed; they wanted amusement, and so did he; and he was not responsible to Mrs. Lyndsay, or any one else, for his conduct." Flora appealed to his conscience. The man had no conscience. It had been hardened and rendered callous long years ago, in the furnace of the world; and she turned from his coarse unfeeling face with sentiments of aversion and disgust. She next tried to warn his simple victims against venturing their little all in an unequal contest with an artful, designing man. In both cases her good intentions were frustrated. The want of employment, and the tedium of a long, dull voyage, protracted under very unfavourable circumstances, an insufficiency of food and water, the want of the latter in particular rendering them feverish and restless, made the emigrants eager for any diversion sufficiently exciting to rouse them from the listless apathy into which many of them were fast sinking. They preferred gambling, and losing their money, to the dulness of remaining inactive; and the avarice of their opponent was too great to yield to a woman's arguments. Mr. Lootie was a person who held dogs and women in contempt, and in return, he was hated and defied by the one, and shunned and disliked by the other; the unerring instinct of the dog, and the refined sensibility of the woman, keenly discriminating the brutal character of the man. In the cabin, the Lyndsays fared very little better than the emigrants in the steerage. Tea, sugar, and coffee were luxuries no longer to be thought of; they just lasted the six weeks; and one morning Sam Fraser, with a rueful face, displayed the empty tea-pot, and conveyed the melancholy intelligence that "they were out of everything fit for Christians to eat or drink." "Can't be helped, Sam," said the Captain, shrugging his shoulders. "We may be thankful that things arn't worse. There is still water in the hold."