s with another, where after
forty-five years of reefing topsails you can't well remember off which
ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in
the fo'cs'le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly,
the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene
lamp.

I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first ship
he ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably have
replied: "I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld weather,
and I was say-sick till I near brought me boots up; and it was 'O for
ould Ireland!' I was cryin' all the time, an' the captin dhrummin me
back with a rope's end to the tune uv it--but the name of the hooker--I
disremimber--bad luck to her, whoever she was!"

So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned above
him, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palmshadowed
harbours, and the men and the women he had known--such men and such
women! The derelicts of the earth and the ocean. Then he nodded off to
sleep again, and when he awoke the moon had gone.

Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale fan of light, vague
as the wing of an ephemera. It vanished and changed back to darkness.

Presently, and almost at a stroke, a pencil of fire ruled a line along
the eastern horizon, and the eastern sky became more beautiful than a
rose leaf plucked in May. The line of fire contracted into one
increasing spot, the rim of the rising sun.

As the light increased the sky above became of a blue impossible to
imagine unless seen, a wan blue, yet living and sparkling as if born of
the impalpable dust of sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like the
harp of Apollo touched by the fingers of the god. The light was music
to the soul. It was day.

"Daddy!" suddenly cried Dick, sitting up in the sunlight and rubbing
his eyes with his open palms. "Where are we?"

"All right, Dicky, me son!" cried the old sailor, who had been standing
up casting his eyes round in a vain endeavour to sight the boats. "Your
daddy's as safe as if he was in hivin; he'll be wid us in a minit, an'
bring another ship along with him. So you're awake, are you, Em'line?"

Emmeline, sitting up in the old pilot coat, nodded in reply without
speaking. Another child might have supplemented Dick's enquiries as to
her uncle by questions of her own, but she did not.

Did she guess that there was some subterfuge in Mr