began to "look about" him to increase the
fleet.

CHAPTER XI.

That the Scot is largely endowed with the commercial imagination his
foes will be ready to acknowledge. Imagination may consecrate the world
to a man, or it may merely be a visualizing faculty which sees that as
already perfect which is still lying in the raw material. The Scot has
the lower faculty in full degree; he has the forecasting leap of the
mind which sees what to make of things--more, sees them made and in
vivid operation. To him there is a railway through the desert where no
railway exists, and mills along the quiet stream. And his _perfervidum
ingenium_ is quick to attempt the realizing of his dreams. That is why
he makes the best of colonists. Galt is his type--Galt, dreaming in
boyhood of the fine water power a fellow could bring round the hill,
from the stream where he went a-fishing (they have done it since),
dreaming in manhood of the cities yet to rise amid Ontario's woods (they
are there to witness to his foresight). Indeed, so flushed and riotous
can the Scottish mind become over a commercial prospect that it
sometimes sends native caution by the board, and a man's really fine
idea becomes an empty balloon, to carry him off to the limbo of
vanities. There is a megalomaniac in every parish of Scotland. Well, not
so much as that; they're owre canny for that to be said of them. But in
every district almost you may find a poor creature who for thirty years
has cherished a great scheme by which he means to revolutionize the
world's commerce, and amass a fortune in monstrous degree. He is
generally to be seen shivering at the Cross, and (if you are a nippy
man) you shout carelessly in going by, "Good-morning, Tamson; how's the
scheme?" And he would be very willing to tell you, if only you would
wait to listen. "Man," he will cry eagerly behind you, "if I only had
anither wee wheel in my invention--she would do, the besom! I'll sune
have her ready noo." Poor Tamson!

But these are the exceptions. Scotsmen, more than other men perhaps,
have the three great essentials of commercial success--imagination to
conceive schemes, common sense to correct them, and energy to push them
through. Common sense, indeed, so far from being wanting, is in most
cases too much in evidence, perhaps, crippling the soaring mind and
robbing the idea of its early radiance; in quieter language, she makes
the average Scotsman to be over-cautious. His combinatio