Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/285

 thing for diving; and on the other side was a priceless mine of blue clay, soft, oozy, irresistible. Yet the argosies that floated up and down those staid and unruffled waters, it must be confessed, were chiefly cargoes of brick and sand and limestone.

Even the Greyhound herself, in the days when she was still respectably known as the Maggie Watson and had no thought, indeed, of ever flying the skull and cross-bones at her masthead, had journeyed under many an ignominious burden of red brick and plastering-sand. But for two long years, before drifting into those dark and evil habits which were to prove such an unlooked-for disgrace to her old age, the Maggie Watson had lain abandoned, just under the railway bridge, with tadpoles and wrigglers disporting themselves between her battered decks, and Chamboro's one cab-driver calmly and impudently using her as a platform whereon to wash down, of a Sunday morning, his imperishable old four-wheeler. Here, for two years, she had been gazed on passively yet regretfully.

It was with the advent of Lonely that the beginning of the more aggressive policy