was
left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong--or
nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub--if a mistake
was to be made, he made it.

He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and
Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element
from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic
nature is a fast dye, and Mr Button's nature was such that though he
had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in 'Frisco, though he had got drunk
in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains
and been man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies
about with him--they, and a very large stock of original innocence.

Nearly over the musician's head swung a hammock from which hung a leg;
other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of
lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light
forward past the heel of the bowsprit to the knightheads, lighting here
a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which
protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark mossy hair, here an
arm tattooed.

It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships'
crews, and the fo'cs'le of the Northumberland had a full company: a
crowd of packet rats such as often is to be found on a Cape Horner
"Dutchmen" [sic] Americans--men who were farm labourers and tending
pigs in Ohio three months back, old seasoned sailors like Paddy
Button--a mixture of the best and the worst of the earth, such as you
find nowhere else in so small a space as in a ship's fo'cs'le.

The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn.
Bound from New Orleans to 'Frisco she had spent thirty days battling
with head-winds and storms--down there, where the seas are so vast that
three waves may cover with their amplitude more than a mile of sea
space; thirty days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and just now, at the
moment of this story, she was locked in a calm south of the line.

Mr Button finished his tune with a sweep of the bow, and drew his right
coat sleeve across his forehead. Then he took out a sooty pipe, filled
it with tobacco, and lit it.

"Pawthrick," drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which
depended the leg, "what was that yarn you wiz beginnin' to spin ter
night 'bout a lip-me-dawn?"

"A which me-dawn?" asked Mr Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom of
the hammock w