Chapter 1

Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear.
He was playing the “Shan van vaught,” and accompanying the tune,
punctuating 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 moon, seen red through 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 simply because everything he did he did wrong—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 him and
Connaught 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 most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains
and been man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies
about with him—they, and a very large stock of original innocence.

Nearly over the musician’s head swung a hammock from which hung a leg;
other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of
lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light
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
“Dutchmen” Americans—men who were farm labourers and tending
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 _Northumberland_ had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn.
Bound from New Orleans to ’Frisco she had spent thirty days battling
with head-winds and storms—down there, where the seas are so vast that
three waves may cover with their amplitude more than a mile of sea
space; thirty days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and just now, at the
moment of this story, she was locked in a calm south of the line.

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.”