urated garments: "it was the only one I had. Oh, my jacket, my
jacket!"

Strange that such a dull piece of still life should risk his life for a
jacket--and an old one that had seen good service and was quite
threadbare; but necessity replies, it was his only garment. A rich
person can scarcely comprehend the magnitude of the loss of an only
jacket to a poor man.

No one was more amused by the adventure of the jacket than Stephen
Corrie, who wrote a comic song on the subject, which Duncan the fiddler
set to music, and used to sing, to the great annoyance of the hero of
the tale, whenever he ventured in his shirt sleeves upon the deck.

The Duncans, for there were two of them, were both highlanders, and
played with much skill on the violin. They were two fine, honest,
handsome fellows, who, with their music and singing kept all the rest
alive. Directly the sun set, the lively notes of their fiddles called
young and old to the deck, and Scotch reels, highland flings, and
sailors' hornpipes were danced till late at night--often until the broad
beams of the rising sun warned the revellers that it was time to rest.

The Captain and the Lyndsays never joined the dancers; but it was a
pretty sight to watch them leaping and springing, full of agility and
life, beneath the clear beams of the summer moon.

The foremost in these nightly revels was a young highlander called Tam
Grant, who never gave over while a female in the ship could continue on
her legs. If he lacked a partner he would seize hold of the old beldame,
Granny Williamson, and twist and twirl her around at top speed, never
heeding the kicking, scratching, and shrieking of the withered old
crone. Setting to her, and nodding at her with the tassel of the red
nightcap he wore, hanging so jauntily over his left eye, that it would
have made the fortune of a comic actor to imitate--he was a perfect
impersonification of mischief and wild mirth.

By-and-by the old granny not only got used to his mad capers, but
evidently enjoyed them; and used to challenge Tam for her partner; and
if he happened to have engaged a younger and lighter pair of heels, she
would retire to her den below, cursing him for a rude fellow, in no
lullaby strains.

And there was big Marion, a tall, stout, yellow-haired girl, from
Berwickshire, who had ventured out all alone, to cross the wide Atlantic
to join her brother in the far west of Canada, who was the admiration of
all the sailors on boa