" said Mr Button; "nor you afther me. Be damned to the
grog and thim that sells it!"

"It's all darned easy to talk," said Ohio. "You curse the grog at sea
when you can't get it; set you ashore, and you're bung full."

"I likes me dhrunk," said Mr Button, "I'm free to admit; an' I'm the
divil when it's in me, and it'll be the end of me yet, or me ould
mother was a liar. `Pat,' she says, first time I come home from say
rowlin', `storms you may escape, an wimmen you may escape, but the
potheen 'ill have you.' Forty year ago--forty year ago!"

"Well," said Ohio, "it hasn't had you yet."

"No," replied Mr Button, "but it will."

CHAPTER II

UNDER THE STARS

It was a wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty and
beauty of starlight and a tropic calm.

The Pacific slept; a vast, vague swell flowing from far away down south
under the night, lifted the Northumberland on its undulations to the
rattling sound of the reef points and the occasional creak of the
rudder; whilst overhead, near the fiery arch of the Milky Way, hung the
Southern Cross like a broken kite.

Stars in the sky, stars in the sea, stars by the million and the
million; so many lamps ablaze that the firmament filled the mind with
the idea of a vast and populous city--yet from all that living and
flashing splendour not a sound.

Down in the cabin--or saloon, as it was called by courtesy--were seated
the three passengers of the ship; one reading at the table, two playing
on the floor.

The man at the table, Arthur Lestrange, was seated with his large,
deep-sunken eyes fixed on a book. He was most evidently in
consumption--very near, indeed, to reaping the result of that last and
most desperate remedy, a long sea voyage.

Emmeline Lestrange, his little niece--eight years of age, a mysterious
mite, small for her age, with thoughts of her own, wide-pupilled eyes
that seemed the doors for visions, and a face that seemed just to have
peeped into this world for a moment ere it was as suddenly
withdrawn--sat in a corner nursing something in her arms, and rocking
herself to the tune of her own thoughts.

Dick, Lestrange's little son, eight and a bit, was somewhere under the
table. They were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for the
sun and splendour of Los Angeles, where Lestrange had bought a small
estate, hoping there to enjoy the life whose lease would be renewed by
the long sea voyage.

As he sat reading, the cabin d