"'Safe!' he sings out. 'Safe! Well, by—gosh! Pard, I hate to say it, but it's the Lord's truth—you had me doin' my "Now I lay me's!"'
"For a minute we looked at each other. Then says I, sort of thinkin' out loud, 'I cal'late,' I says, 'that whether a man's brave or not depends consider'ble on whether he's used to his latitude. It's all accordin'. It lays in the bringin' up, as the duck said when the hen tried to swim.'
"He nodded solemn. 'Pard,' says he, 'I sure reckon you've called the turn. Let's shake hands on it.'"
XIV—The Dollar[M]
By Morgan Robertson
HIS name was Angus Macpherson—pronounced MacPhairson—but he was so intensely Scotch that in every ship he had sailed in men called him Scotty. He had a face like a harvest-moon, with a sorrowful expression of the eyes, a frame like a gladiator's, a brogue modified from its original consistency to an understandable dialect, and the soul of a Scotchman—which means that he was possessed by two dominant and conflicting passions, love of God and love of Mammon. Add to these attributes a masterful knowledge of seamanship and an acquaintance with navigation, and you have a rough sketch of him as he stood at the wheel of a tow-barge just out of New York.