force on his head, and he lay sprawling in the lee
scuppers.

'I'll teach ye,' she said, 'to laugh at an auld wife, you gang-the-gate
swinger.'

'Mither! mither!' pleaded Moncrieff, 'will you never be able to behave
like a lady?'

The steward crawled forward crestfallen, and the men did not let him
forget his adventure in a hurry.

'Mither's a ma_rr_vel,' Moncrieff whispered to me more than once that
evening, for at table no 'laird's lady' could have behaved so well, albeit
her droll remarks and repartee kept us all laughing. After dinner it was
just the same--there were no bounds to her good-nature, her excellent
spirits and comicality. Even when asked to sing she was by no means taken
aback, but treated us to a ballad of five-and-twenty verses, with a chorus
to each; but as it told a story of love and war, of battle and siege, of
villainy for a time in the ascendant, and virtue triumphant at the end, it
really was not a bit wearisome; and when Moncrieff told us that she could
sing a hundred more as good, we all agreed that his mother was indeed a
marvel.

I have said the voyage was uneventful, but this is talking as one who has
been across the wide ocean many times and oft. No long voyage can be
uneventful; but nothing very dreadful happened to mar our passage to Rio
de Janeiro. We were not caught in a tornado; we were not chased by a
pirate; we saw no suspicious sail; no ghostly voice hailed us from aloft
at the midnight hour; no shadowy form beckoned us from a fog. We did not
even spring a leak, nor did the mainyard come tumbling down. But we _did_
have foul weather off Finisterre; a man _did_ fall overboard, and was duly
picked up again; a shark _did_ follow the ship for a week, but got no
corpse to devour, only the contents of the cook's pail, sundry bullets
from sundry revolvers, and, finally, a red-hot brick rolled in a bit of
blanket. Well, of course, a man fell from aloft and knocked his shoulder
out--a man always does--and Mother Carey's chickens flew around our stern,
boding bad weather, which never came, and shoals of porpoises danced
around us at sunset, and we saw huge whales pursuing their solitary path
through the bosom of the great deep, and we breakfasted off flying fish,
and caught Cape pigeons, and wondered at the majestic flight of the
albatross; and we often saw lightning without hearing thunder, and heard
thunder without seeing lightning; and in due course we heard the thrilling
shout from