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people.”
    Barely on board the vessel and this seventeen-year-old whelp has taken on knowing airs, he has taken to contradicting his father. Fatigue, astonishment, and the weight of the greatcoat he is wearing prevent Old James from cuffing him.
    All the business of life aboard ship has already been explained to the family. In fact it has been explained by the old man himself. He was the one who knew all about provisions, accommodations, and the kind of people you would find on board. All Scotsmen and all decent folk. No Highlanders, no Irish.
    But now he cries out that it is like the swarm of bees in the carcass of the lion.
    “An evil lot, an evil lot. Oh, that ever we left our native land!”
    “We have not left yet,” says Andrew. “We are still looking at Leith. We would do best to go below and find ourselves a place.”

    More lamentation. The bunks are narrow, bare planks with horsehair pallets both hard and prickly.
    “Better than nothing,” says Andrew.
    “Oh, that it was ever put in my head to bring us here, onto this floating sepulchre.”
    Will nobody shut him up? thinks Agnes. This is the way he will go on and on, like a preacher or a lunatic, when the fit takes him. She cannot abide it. She is in more agony herself than he is ever likely to know.
    “Well, are we going to settle here or are we not?” she says.
    Some people have hung up their plaids or shawls to make a half-private space for their families. She goes ahead and takes off her outer wrappings to do the same.
    The child is turning somersaults in her belly. Her face is hot as a coal and her legs throb and the swollen flesh in between them-the lips the child must soon part to get out-is a scalding sack of pain. Her mother would have known what to do about that, she would have known which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice.
    At the thought of her mother such misery overcomes her that she wants to kick somebody.
    Andrew folds up his plaid to make a comfortable seat for his father. The old man seats himself, groaning, and puts his hands up to his face, so that his speaking has a hollow sound.
    “I will see no more. I will not harken to their screeching voices or their satanic tongues. I will not swallow a mouth of meat nor meal until I see the shores of America.”
    All the more for the rest of us, Agnes feels like saying.
    Why does Andrew not speak plainly to his father, reminding him of whose idea it was, who was the one who harangued and borrowed and begged to get them just where they are now?

    Andrew will not do it, Walter will only joke, and as for Mary she can hardly get her voice out of her throat in her father’s presence.
    Agnes comes from a large Hawick family of weavers, who work in the mills now but worked for generations at home. And working there they learned all the arts of cutting each other down to size, of squabbling and surviving in close quarters. She is still surprised by the rigid manners, the deference and silences in her husband’s family. She thought from the beginning that they were a queer sort of people and she thinks so still. They are as poor as her own folk, but they have such a great notion of themselves. And what have they got to back this up? The old man has been a wonder in the tavern for years, and their cousin is a raggedy lying poet who had to flit to Nithsdale when nobody would trust him to tend sheep in Ettrick. They were all brought up by three witchey-women of aunts who were so scared of men that they would run and hide in the sheep pen if anybody but their own family was coming along the road.
    As if it wasn’t the men that should be running from them.
    Walter has come back from carrying their heavier possessions down to a lower depth of the ship.
    “You never saw such a mountain of boxes and trunks and sacks of meal and potatoes,” he says excitedly. “A person has to climb over them to get to the water pipe. Nobody can help but spill their water on the way back and the sacks will be wet