After several days of anxious and almost hopeless search, he was at last informed that the Flora, Captain Ayre, was to leave for Canada in a fortnight. The name seemed propitious, and that very afternoon he walked down with his wife to inspect the vessel.
The Flora was a small brig, very old, very dirty, and with wretched accommodations. The captain was a brutal-looking person, blind of one eye, and very lame. Every third word he uttered was an oath; and instead of answering Mr. Lyndsay’s inquiries, he was engaged in a blasphemous dialogue with his two sons, who were his first and second mates. The young men seemed worthy of their parentage; their whole conversation being interloaded with frightful imprecations on their own limbs and souls, and the limbs and souls of others.
They had a very large number of steerage passengers engaged, for the very small size of the vessel, and these emigrants were of the very lowest description.
“Don’t let us go in this horrible vessel,” whispered Flora to her husband. “What a captain! what a crew! we shall be miserable, if we form any part of her live cargo!”
“I fear, my dear girl, there is no alternative. We may, perhaps, hear of another before she sails. I won’t engage places in her until the last moment.”
The dread of going in the Flora took a hold of the mind of her namesake; and she begged Jim to be on the constant look-out for another vessel.
During their stay at Leith, Lyndsay was busily employed in writing a concluding chapter to his work on the Cape; and Flora amused herself by taking long walks, accompanied by James, the maid, and the baby, in order to explore all the beauties of Edinburgh. The lad, who was very clever, and possessed a wonderful faculty of remembering places and of finding his way among difficulties, always acted as guide on these occasions. Before he had been a week at Leith, he knew every street in Edinburgh; had twice or thrice climbed the heights of Arthur’s Seat, and visited every nook in the old castle. There was not a ship in the harbour of Leith, but he not only knew her name and the name of her captain, but he had made himself acquainted with some of her crew, and could tell her freight and tonnage, her age and capabilities, the port from which she last sailed and the port to which she was then bound, as well as any sailor on the wharf. It was really extraordinary to listen of an evening to the lad’s adventures, and all the mass of information he had acquired during his long rambles through the day.
Flora was always in an agony lest James should be lost, or meet with some mishap during his exploring expeditions; but Mistress Waddel comforted her with the assurance, “That a cat, throw her which way you wu’d, lighted a’ upon her feet. That nought was never tent—an’ they that war’ born to be hanget wu’d never be drowned.”
So, one fine afternoon in June, Flora took it into her head, that she would climb to the top of the mountain, the sight of which from her chamber window she was never tired of contemplating. She asked her husband to go with her. She begged, she entreated, she coaxed; but he was just writing the last pages of his long task, and he told her, that if she would only wait until the next day, he would go with pleasure.
But with Flora, it was this day or none. She had set her whole heart and soul upon going up to the top of the mountain, and to the top of the mountain she determined to go. This resolution was formed, in direct opposition to her husband’s wishes; and with a perfect knowledge of the tale of the dog Ball, which had been one of her father’s stock stories, the catastrophe of which she had known from a child. Lyndsay did not tell her positively she should not go without him; and unable to control her impatience, she gave him the slip, and set off with Jim, who was only too eager for the frolic, on her mountain climbing expedition.