“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.”

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.