“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 warst was at the last. She’d a great clumsy iron twelve-foot Thresher propeller—Aitcheson designed the _Kite’s_’—and just on the tail o’ the shaft, behind the boss, was a red weepin’ crack ye could ha’ put a penknife to. Man, it was an awful crack! “‘When d’ ye ship a new tail-shaft?’ I said to Bannister. “He knew what I meant. ‘Oh, yon’s a superfeecial flaw,’ says he, not lookin’ at me. “‘Superfeecial Gehenna!’ I said. ‘Ye’ll not take her oot wi’ a solution o’ continuity that like.’ “‘They’ll putty it up this evening,’ he said. ‘I’m a married man, an’—ye used to know the Board.’