"Your ladyship must begin again on a new line."
"After hearing you, and all about those charmingly horrid accidents, I am almost tempted to take your advice."
Ferrier was invited to address at least a dozen more drawing-room meetings, and Sir John Rooby grunted, "Young man! I'm ready to put a set of engines in that boat of Cassall's, and you can have so much the more money for her maintenance."
Before Ferrier went to Yarmouth he heard that Fullerton was astounded at the number of financial sheep who had followed the plucky bell-wether. Said he, "We shall never turn our backs now. There will be three hospital cruisers on the stocks before the autumn, and your steamer will serve to supply them when we have them at work. If I were not fixed on God's firm ground, I should think I had passed away and was dreaming blissfully."
Oh! the fury and hurry around that steamer! Men were toiling without cessation during all night and all day; one shift relieved another, and Cassall employed two superintendents instead of one. The way the notion came to him was this:—he had an abrupt but most essentially pleasant way of getting into conversation with casual strangers of all ranks, and he always managed to learn something from them. "Nice smack that on the stocks," he remarked to a bronzed, blue-eyed man who was standing alert on a certain quay.
"Yes, sir. That's honest oak. I like that. But that other's not so honest."
"You mean the steamer?"
"Yes, sir. I don't like the way things goes along. The surveyor's been down. He and the manager are having champagne together now, and you may bet there's some skulking work going on in the dark corners. I know the ocean tramps, sir. Many's the time I've seen the dishonest rivets start out of 'em like buttons of a woman's bodice if it's too tight. If I was an owner, and building a vessel, I'd test every join and every rivet myself. You force a faulty plate into place, and the first time your vessel gets across a sea she buckles, and there's an end of all."
"You understand shipbuilding?"
"Only a sailor does, sir. He has the peril; the builders have the money."