bank, and graciously allowed to buy a few
eggs and some bacon; for nothing more could
be seen, except large loaves of stale bread,
which we had already more than enough of on
board the Stourport. We managed to make
a tolerable breakfast with our purchases, and
Cuddy distinguished himself particularly by
the manner in which he made a number of
eggs supply the place of milk in the coffee.
Captain Bandle looked on, and regarded us
with a half-fatherly interest, at the same
time that he felt we were problems which he
should never be able to solve.

The captain always spoke of the " Coompany,"
as if they stood bodily before him in
the persons of one or two individuals, and
not as a pure abstraction which he had no
personal acquaintance with. He must have
had a pretty fair idea, too, of the number of
shareholders, by the way in which he reckoned
a dead horse as a loss to them of only
fourpence a-piece. Captain Randle's life had
not been very eventful, nor his experience
very wide, and he was, consequently, rather
limited in his topics of conversation. His
stories were not numerous, and his mind
seemed to run very much upon three or four
ideas, which he clung to with characteristic
pertinacity, as being his only holds upon the
past.

His son, the straw-haired boy, had, some
years ago, fallen into a lock, along with the
horse that was towing the boat. The boy
sank beneath the animal, but was got out
after great difficulty, the horse being drowned.
The old man had to report at head-quarters,
as a matter of form, the nature of an accident
that had caused the company the loss of a
horse; and whether, anticipating a demand
being made upon him for the value of the
animal, he had with great difficulty arrived
at an exact estimate of the amount of individual
loss to each shareholder, I cannot
tell; but he certainly never missed an opportunity
of saying to me, when telling the story:

"You see, Must'r Olly, it wur only fourpence
apiece, all round."

Another of Captain Randle's fixed ideas,
was a wonderful faith in the abilities of a
brother who had recently died, and who appeared
to have been the wild erratic genius
of the family.

Ah, Must'r Olly," said the old man, he
wur always drinkun' and fighten' about; an'
if any mon said anythin' to him, he could
cut him loike a knife. Dear, dear, he wur a
room chup, poor Bill; I've seen him stan'
on's head on a table dancin' a 'ornpipe in
the air like mad. But he never did ony good
for hissel', Must'r Olly; never ony good."

It was while in familiar conversation with
Captain Randle, allowing him to convey his
own small stock of stories and ideas uninterruptedly
in his own way, that he made us
acquainted with a great contractor, whose
operations, if only allowed to develope, would
have rivalled in magnitude and money value
anything ever accomplished by Mr. Peto, or
Mr. Cubitt. This unknown contractor may
have had little existence, except in the brain
of Captain Randle; but that did not prevent
our worthy commander from bringing him
before us, with his offers to the company, at
almost every hour of the day. Never did
we mention to the captain, that the canal
was making a wide circuit without much
progress through the country; never did we
come to one of those gradual, step by step,
rises in the ground, and an expensive little
staircase of locks; without being told what
this great unknown contractor had offered
to do.

"You see, Must'r Olly," said the captain,
"what this coompany wants is another toonnel,
runnin' under that groun' yander, an'
cutting off sixteen locks at once."

"An expensive job, Captain," I replied.

"Must'r Olly," he continued impressively,
"this mon told the coompany they'd save it
in twenty year, an' he offered to do it for a
million an' a 'arf."

"Who is this man, dealing in such large
sums? " asked Cuddy.

"Well, he be a lock-keeper, William," said
the captain.

I endeavoured to explain to our commander
(but with no effect), how gladly many
contractors would have undertaken the proposed
task for something considerably less.

"Noa, Must'r Oily," he said; " a million
an' a 'arf is what he offered to do it for;
an' he told the coompany it would be the
makin of 'em."

By this time the sun was getting high in
the heavens, and we had finished breakfast;
while Captain Randle was now busy
in dishing up an early dinner for himself and
his men. This consisted of large lumps of
the boiled beef, mixed with slices of bacon,
and all fried together in a pan. When it
was put upon a plate on the deck, by the
side of an eight pound mountain of bread,
the salt-box, and the pepper-box, it looked
so very fat, so very yellow, and so very
greasy, that Cuddy, who frames his conduct
upon polite models, thought we ought, in
common courtesy, to leave the boatmen to
enjoy their meal undisturbed. Before his
thoughtful suggestion could be carried into
execution, and we had leaped off the barge
on to the towing-path, under a bridge, to
take a morning's walk, Captain Eandle
detained us for a few minutes by a favourite
question, which he always would put to us
when the Stourport's victualling system was
in any way brought under our notice.

The captain felt a complete identity of
interest with his butcher, with whom he had
dealt for upwards of twenty-five years; and
he was always asking us, what estimate we
could form of the probable extent of this
great provision-dealer's business.

"How many beasts d'ye think he killed
last Tuesday? " inquired the captain.