"And how will you do it?" the girl asked. Every inch of her, ye'll understand, has to be livened up and made to work wi' its neighbour - sweetenin' her, we call it, technically." She's all here, but the parrts of her have not learned to work together yet. "But it's this way wi' ships, Miss Frazier. "So she is, said the skipper, with a laugh. "I thought father said she was exceptionally well found." In the nature o' things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. "But I'm sayin' that it takes more than christenin' to mak' a ship. "Oh, she's no so bad," the skipper replied cautiously. "And now," said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, "she's a real ship, isn't she? It seems only the other day father gave the order for her, and now - and now - isn't she a beauty!" The girl was proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner. Her house-flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the High and Narrow Seas and wished to make her welcome.
It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness - she was painted lead-colour with a red funnel - looked very fine indeed.
Her owners - they were a very well known Scotch firm - came round with her from the north, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass work, and the patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of champagne when she named the steamer the Dimbula. This boat was, perhaps, two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Any one can make a floating hotel that will pay expenses, if he puts enough money into the saloon, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like but in these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo-boat must be built for cheapness, great hold-capacity, and a certain steady speed. It was her first voyage, and though she was but a cargo-steamer of twenty-five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and machinery and her designers and owner thought as much of her as though she had been the Lucania. The Ship That Found Herself by Rudyard Kipling
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane.The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne.