THE WAVE "WENT OUT IN THREE SURGES, MAKING A CLEAN SWEEP OF A BOAT."
THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF.
By Rudyard Kipling,
Author of "The Jungle Book," "Plain Tales from the Hills," etc.
T was her first voyage, and though she was only a little cargo steamer of two thousand five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and machinery; and her designers and owners thought just as much of her as though she had been the "Lucania." Any one can make a floating hotel that will pay her expenses, if he only puts enough money into the saloon, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo boat must be built for cheapness, great hold capacity, and a certain steady speed. This boat was perhaps two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her owners—they were a very well-known Scotch family—came round with her from the North, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass-work and the patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of very good champagne when she christened the steamer the "Dimbula." It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness (she was painted lead color, with a red funnel) looked very fine indeed. Her house flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the sea and wished to make her welcome.
"And now," said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, "she's a real ship, isn't she? It seems only the other day father gave the order for her, and now—and now—isn't she a beauty?" The girl was proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner.
"Oh, she's no so bad," the skipper replied, cautiously. "But I'm sayin' that it takes more than the christenin' to mak' a ship. In the nature o' things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet."