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 while he held the match to his pipe.
“It vas about a green thing,” came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk.
“Oh, a Leprachaun you mane. Sure, me mother’s sister had one down in Connaught.”
“Vat vas it like?” asked the dreamy Dutch voice—a voice seemingly possessed by the calm that had made the sea like a mirror for the last three days, reducing the whole ship’s company meanwhile to the level of wasters.
“Like? Sure, it was like a Leprachaun; and what else would it be like?”
“What like vas that?” persisted the voice.
“It was like a little man no bigger than a big forked raddish, an’ as green as a cabbidge. Me a’nt had one in her house down in Connaught in the ould days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but you could have put him in your pocket, and the grass-green head of him wouldn’t more than’v stuck out. She kept him in a cupboard, and out of the cupboard he’d pop if it was a crack open, an’ into the milk pans he’d be, or under the beds, or pullin’ the stool from under you, or at some other divarsion. He’d chase the pig—the crathur!—till it’d be all ribs like an ould umbrilla with the fright, an’ as thin as a greyhound with the runnin’ by the marnin; he’d addle the eggs so the cocks an’ hens wouldn’t know what they wis afther wid the chickens comin’ out wid two heads on them, an’ twinty-seven legs fore and aft. And you’d start to chase him, an’ then it’d be mainsail haul, and away he’d go, you behint him, till you’d landed tail over snout in a ditch, an’ he’d be back in the cupboard.”
“He was a Troll,” murmured the Dutch voice.
“I’m tellin’ you he was a Leprachaun, and there’s no knowin’ the divilments he’d be up to. He’d pull the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot boilin’ on the fire forenint your eyes, and baste you in the face with it; and thin, maybe, you’d hold out your fist to him, and he’d put a goulden soverin in it.”
“Wisht he was here!” murmured a voice from a bunk near the knightheads.
“Pawthrick,” drawled the voice from the hammock above, “what’d you do first if you found y’self with twenty pound in your pocket?”
“What’s the use of askin’ me?” replied Mr. Button. “What’s the use of twenty pound to a sayman at say, where the grog’s all wather an’ the beef’s all horse? Gimme it ashore, an’ you’d see what I’d do wid it!”
“I guess the nearest grog-shop keeper wouldn’t see you comin’ for dust,” said a voice from Ohio.
“He would not,” 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.”
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
