of this class. He felt no remorse in replenishing
his pockets from the scanty resources of these poor emigrants, joining
in the lowest species of gambling in order to win their money, part of
which, as a sort of excuse to himself, he expended in liquor, in order
to reconcile his victims to their loss; for, with very few exceptions,
he was always the winner.

Even the solitary sixpence, the sole fortune of the brothers Muckleroy,
found its way into the pocket of the rapacious defaulter.

Flora watched these proceedings until she could control her indignation
no longer, and accosting Mr. Lootie on deck, she remonstrated with him
on his immoral and most ungentlemanly conduct. He replied, with a sneer,
"They were fools. He had as much right to take advantage of their folly
as another. Some one would win their money if he did not. The people
were hungry and disappointed; they wanted amusement, and so did he; and
he was not responsible to Mrs. Lyndsay, or any one else, for his
conduct."

Flora appealed to his conscience.

The man had no conscience. It had been hardened and rendered callous
long years ago, in the furnace of the world; and she turned from his
coarse unfeeling face with sentiments of aversion and disgust.

She next tried to warn his simple victims against venturing their little
all in an unequal contest with an artful, designing man. In both cases
her good intentions were frustrated. The want of employment, and the
tedium of a long, dull voyage, protracted under very unfavourable
circumstances, an insufficiency of food and water, the want of the
latter in particular rendering them feverish and restless, made the
emigrants eager for any diversion sufficiently exciting to rouse them
from the listless apathy into which many of them were fast sinking. They
preferred gambling, and losing their money, to the dulness of remaining
inactive; and the avarice of their opponent was too great to yield to a
woman's arguments. Mr. Lootie was a person who held dogs and women in
contempt, and in return, he was hated and defied by the one, and shunned
and disliked by the other; the unerring instinct of the dog, and the
refined sensibility of the woman, keenly discriminating the brutal
character of the man.

In the cabin, the Lyndsays fared very little better than the emigrants
in the steerage. Tea, sugar, and coffee were luxuries no longer to be
thought of; they just lasted the six weeks; and one morning Sam Fraser,
with