"
They agreed, I fear, for more reasons than this that
England was a good country to leave early; and you cannot
blame them--there was not one of them who did not offer
in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own
dividing chance grew dramatic in their eyes.
"I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before
I sailed," said McGill. "Great Scott, if I'd taken that
clerkship!" He saw all his glorious past, I suppose, in
a suburban aspect.
"I was kicked out," said Cameron, "and it was the kindest
attention my father ever paid me;" and Bates remarked
that it was worth coming out second-class, as he did, to
go back in the best cabin in the ship.
The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind
them prompted them to this kind of congratulation, with
just a thought of compunction at the back of it for their
own better fortunes. In the further spectacle of England
most of them saw the repository of singularly old-fashioned
ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the
market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at
imperial sentiment; they were full of the terms of their
bargain and had, as they would have said, little use for
schemes that did not commend themselves on a basis of
common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best
of them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common
formulas; submitted them and submitted to them.
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