The Blue Lagoon: A Romance | Page 6

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" [sic] 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 radish, 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 main-sail 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