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Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear

He was playing the "Shan van vaught," and acco it, with blows of his left heel on the fo'cs'le deck

"O the Frinch are in the bay, Says the Shan van vaught"

He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize--green in parts from the influence of sun and salt A typical old shell-back, round-shouldered, hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab about it

His face was like a h tropical mists; and as he played it wore an expression of strained attention as though the fiddle were telling him tales much more marvellous than the old bald statement about Bantry Bay

"Left-handed Pat," was his fo'cs'le name; not because he was left-handed, but si--or nearly so Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub--if a mistake was to be made, he made it

He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between hiht these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr Button's nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in 'Frisco, though he had got drunk in h he had sailed with Yankee captains and been man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies about with hiinal innocence

Nearly over the ; other haestions of le kerosene laht forward past the heel of the bowsprit to the knightheads, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark mossy hair, here an arm tattooed

It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships' crews, and the fo'cs'le of the Northumberland had a full company: a crowd of packet rats such as often is to be found on a Cape Horner "Dutch pigs in Ohio three months back, old seasoned sailors like Paddy Button--a mixture of the best and the worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small a space as in a ship's fo'cs'le

The Northu of the Horn