"You cannot bless yourself, laddie, until you bless others," she said, "and the sooner you go about the business, the better for everybody."
So that night Andrew started for Glasgow, and when he reached that city, he was fortunate enough to find the very ship in which Jamie had sailed away, lying at her dock. The first mate recalled the young man readily.
"The more by token that he had my own name," he said to Andrew. "We are both of us Fife Logans, and I took a liking to the lad, and he told me his trouble."
"About some lost money?" asked Andrew.
"Nay, he said nothing about money. It was some love trouble, I take it. He thought he could better forget the girl if he ran away from his country and his work. He has found out his mistake by this time, no doubt."
"You knew he was going to leave 'The Line' then?"
"Yes, we let him go; and I heard say that he had shipped on an American line, sailing to Cuba, or New Orleans, or somewhere near the equator."
"Well, I shall try and find him."
"I wouldn't, if I was you. He is sure to come back to his home again. He showed me a lock of the lassie's hair. Man! a single strand of it would pull him back to Scotland sooner or later."
"But I have wronged him sorely. I did not mean to wrong him, but that does not alter the case."
"Not a bit. Love sickness is one thing; a wrong against a man's good name or good fortune, is a different matter. I would find him and right him."
"That is what I want to do."
And so when the Circassia sailed out of Greenock for New York, Andrew Binnie sailed in her. "It is not a very convenient journey," he said rather sadly, as he left Scotland behind him, "but wrong has been done, and wrong has no warrant, and I'll never have a good day till I put the wrong right; so the sooner the better, for, as Mother says, 'that which a fool does at the end a wise man does at the beginning.'"