Some years later it was my good fortune to go for the trial trip, as the guest of the Chairman of the Cunard Company, in the greatest ship and wonder of her day, the Lusitania (July, 1907), and lastly, to have been to the inaugural luncheon on one of the five new (1909) ships of the Orient Line, fitted with all the latest modern improvements, from electric plate-washers to electric potato-peelers and egg-boilers. This last was truly a little history in shipping. Where will wondrous labour-saving inventions end? It is these magnificent boats which do so much to cement the friendship and foster family ties between us and our Colonies, and when one sees that in an Orient steamer third-class passengers can travel twenty-six thousand miles for eighteen pounds, one opens one’s eyes at the comfort and marvels. These travellers have even a third-class music-room, and never more than six people in a cabin. Children can visit their parents, husbands their wives, in fact, the East and West become as one. Sir Frederick Green, the Chairman of the Orient Company, is not only a delightful man, but is extremely enterprising, and has achieved wonderful things. Even the amateur band, composed of stewards, has been abolished, and proper professional music is provided for the passengers. Those terrible days when one packed up sufficient underlinen for six weeks’ use have gone by, and everything can now be sent to the laundry on board on Monday morning, as regularly as it is done at home.
The christening of the proud P. & O. Assaye amused me the more at the time because of its sharp contrast with a humble Highland “baptisement,” at which it had also been my lot to assist a few years earlier. This last committal of a boat to the sea was the subject a year or two after of one of my sketches in words, and may be here given again, for who amongst us, on watching a fishing-smack going out from harbour, does not feel a stir of interest, and wish that “weel may the boatie row”?
At that time we—my husband was alive—had a little house in Sutherland, and became much interested in the simple fisher-folk near by.
“Can you speak to Mrs. Murray, the fishwife, for a minute. Very particular, she says, ma’am,” said the parlourmaid one morning.
“All right,” and, leaving the steaming herrings on the breakfast-table, I went to the door to see Mrs. Murray.
“Good morning, Mrs. Murray. Did you want to see me?”
“’Deed, mem, yes, mem,” and the old body in short serge skirt, so full at the waist that her creel of fish literally rested on the pleats, beamed all over inside her nice, clean, white “mutch” cap.
“Maybe ye ken, mistress, we have got a new haddie boatie [haddock boat], and we want to have the baptisement whatever.”
“Well?”