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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 palm-shadowed 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.