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They spoke of the ship's mystery, of the Captain's lady. She was a character to pique a sailorman's interest, the Lady of the Golden Bough. Her fame was as wide, and much sweeter, than the vessel's. With all their toughs' frankness, the crowd were discussing the lady's puzzling relations with Swope. "Uncommon queer, I calls it," said one chap, who had sailed in the ship.

Not a bit particular in choice of candidates, he roared against Dunlop, Duncan, or "Twenty-One" according to the company which Saunders kept. "Ye havna the ghaist of a show!" he assured Cap'en McKay, chief of the Dunlopers. "McCakeron drew three mair to him last night." While to the elder he exclaimed the same day: "Yon crazy sailorman's got all the Duncanites o' the run. He has ye spanked, Elder.

It seemed to Wyllard that he had seldom heard anything more expressive in its way than this sailorman's brief and fragmentary description of his life in the wilderness. He had heard from steam whaler skippers a little about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing beyond the mosses ever grew.

But the name pleased her after her beloved lord had explained. "I was saving that name for the handsomest clipper-ship that money could build," he said. "But when I married you, little woman, I got something better than a clipper-ship; and when you know sailorman's natur' better, you'll know what that compliment means.

For an instant Cap'n Sproul was moved by a wild impulse to let her slat her way to complete destruction, but the sailorman's instinct triumphed, and he worked her round, chewing a strand of his beard with venom.

I admire a man who does not hesitate to salute the world in the dialect of his calling. How salty and stimulating, for example, is the sailorman's hail of "Ship ahoy!" It is like a breeze laden with briny odours and a pleasant dash of spray. The miners in some parts of Germany have a good greeting for their dusky trade. They cry to one who is going down the shaft, "Gluck auf!"

A red ensign was seized jack downward in her main rigging, the highest note of the sailorman's agony of distress. On its wooden case, in her starboard fore-rigging, a dioptric lens sent out the faint green glow of a lamp's light into the sunshine. The third mate drew attention to this last "Lot of oil in that lamp," he said, "or it means they haven't deserted her very long.

"Very well," I said; "go your own way, Polson, since go you will. But I wouldn't mind betting the sailorman's favourite wager a farthing's worth of silver spoons that before another year has passed over your head you will alter your tune. Take care that you do not defer the alteration until it is too late and the mischief has become irrevocable."

Whether the fact of war is an incentive or whether American boys are adapted, through a life of competitive sport, quickly to grasp the sailorman's trade, the truth remains that in a very short space the boy who has never seen a ship develops swiftly into a bluejacket, rolling, swaggering, but none the less deft, precise, and indomitable.

"Fancy what he must have suffered," said Mrs-Barber, shivering; "and then to turn up safe and sound a twelvemonth afterwards. He ought to-make a book of it." "It's all in a sailorman's dooty," said Captain Barber, shaking his head. "It's wot 'e expects." His wife rose, and talking the while proceeded to clear the table.