housand dollars; he deserved it well,
the dishonourable scamp! We were now in Trinity, we had done five
miles in less than twelve minutes; but Miss Lambton was so angry, and
the old gentleman so bitter cold and stiff--a pair of fire-tongs is
nothing compared to him--Couldn't be helped, however. Honor before
every thing."

"But you really were too foolhardy," observed Richards.

"Foolhardy!" repeated Doughby, "foolhardy, when the honour of a ship
was at stake!"

"Pshaw! The honour of a steam-boat!"

"Pshaw, do you say, Richards? Well, if I didn't know you to be a
thoroughbred Virginian, hang me if I should not almost take you for
one of those wishywashy Creoles. Pshaw, say you, the honour of a
steam-boat! A steamer, let me tell you, is also a ship, and a big one
too, and an American one, a thorough American one. It's our ship; we
invented it, they'd have been long enough in the old country before
finding such a thing out--Pshaw, do you say? And if Percy had said
pshaw upon Lake Erie, or Lawrence on Champlain, or Rogers, or Porter,
you might say pshaw to every thing--to the honour of a steamer, a
ship, a country. But I tell you that the man who says pshaw when his
ship is beaten in a race, will also say it when it is taken in a
fight. In short, that sort of pride is emulation, and that emulation
is the real thing."

"But the life of so many men?"

"I tell you, that of the hundred and twenty passengers that we had on
board the Helen, there were not three besides that leathern old
Yankee, Mister Lambton, and the women, who would have cared one straw
if the boiler had burst, provided we had got to Trinity two minutes
the sooner."

We could not help laughing at this Kentucky bull, but at the same time
we were compelled to admit the truth of what Doughby meant to say. In
spite of Uncle Sam's usual phlegm and _nonchalance_, there are
occasions when he seems to change his nature; and in the anxiety to
see his ship first at the goal, to forget what he does not otherwise
easily lose sight of, namely, wife and child, land and goods; as to
his own life, it does not weigh a feather in the balance. He becomes a
perfect madman, setting every thing upon a single cast. And the yearly
loss of five hundred to a thousand lives, sacrificed in these
desperate races, does not appear to cure him in any degree of his
mania.

"Well," continued Doughby, resuming his narrative, "it was as much as
I could do to get a word from Miss Emily