se, I heard him snore."

Emmeline nearly always "Mr Buttoned" her friend; sometimes she called
him "Mr Paddy." As for Dick, it was always "Paddy," pure and simple.
Children have etiquettes of their own.

It must often strike landsmen and landswomen that the most terrible
experience when cast away at sea in an open boat is the total absence
of privacy. It seems an outrage on decency on the part of Providence to
herd people together so. But, whoever has gone through the experience
will bear me out that the human mind enlarges, and things that would
shock us ashore are as nothing out there, face to face with eternity.

If so with grown-up people, how much more so with this old shell-back
and his two charges?

And indeed Mr Button was a person who called a spade a spade, had no
more conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges just
as a nursemaid might look after her charges, or a walrus after its
young.

There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and some tinned
stuff--mostly sardines.

I have known a sailor to open a box of sardines with a tin tack. He was
in prison, the sardines had been smuggled into him, and he had no
can-opener. Only his genius and a tin tack.

Paddy had a jack-knife, however, and in a marvellously short time a box
of sardines was opened, and placed on the stern-sheets beside some
biscuits.

These, with some water and Emmeline's Tangerine orange, which she
produced and added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fell
to. When they had finished, the remains were put carefully away, and
they proceeded to step the tiny mast.

The sailor, when the mast was in its place, stood for a moment resting
his hand on it, and gazing around him over the vast and voiceless blue.

The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday,
and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the
happiest thing in colour--sparkling, vague, newborn--the blue of heaven
and youth.

"What are you looking for, Paddy?" asked Dick.

"Say-gulls," replied the prevaricator; then to himself: "Not a sight or
a sound of them! Musha! musha! which way will I steer--north, south,
aist, or west? It's all wan, for if I steer to the aist, they may be in
the west; and if I steer to the west, they may be in the aist; and I
can't steer to the west, for I'd be steering right in the wind's eye.
Aist it is; I'll make a soldier's wind of it, and thrust to chance."

He set the