Chapter I
Where the Slush Lamp[1] Burns
Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the “Shan van vaught,[2]” and accompanying the tune with blows of his left heel on the deck.
“O the Frinch are in the bay,
Says the Shan van vaught.”
He was dressed in a striped shirt, rough trousers and a jacket—green from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shell-back, round-shouldered, hook-fingered like a crab.
His face was like a moon, red through tropical mists; and as he played it wore an expression of attention as though the fiddle were telling him marvellous tales.
“Left-handed Pat,” was his nickname; not because he was left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong—or nearly so.
He was a Celt[3], and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught[4] 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[5], and Mr Button’s nature was such that 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.
Nearly over the musician’s head swung a hammock from which hung a leg. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light forward, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which stuck a pipe, here a breast covered with dark hair, here an arm tattooed.
It was in the days when the cockpit of the Northumberland [6] had a full company: a crowd of men who were farm labourers and grazed pigs in Ohio[7] 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 cockpit.
The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn[8]. Bound from New Orleans to ’Frisco[9] she had spent thirty days battling with headwinds and storms, and just now, at the moment of this story, she was locked in a calm, south of the line.
Mr Button finished his tune and drew his right coat sleeve across his forehead[10]. Then he took out a sooty pipe, filled it with tobacco, and lit it.
“Pawthrick,” drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which hung down the leg, “what vas you singing ter night ’bout a lip?”
“A which lip?” 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[11] you mean. Sure, me mother’s sister had one down in Connaught.”
“Vat vas it like?” asked the dreamy Dutch voice.
“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, 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. He’d chase the pig till it’d be all ribs like an ould umbrilla with the fright; he’d spoil the eggs so the chickens comin’ out wid two heads on them, an’ twinty-seven legs. And you’d start to chase him, an’ then away he’d go, you behint him, till you’d landed 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’ what he’d be up to[12]. He’d pull the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot boilin’ on the fire and hit 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 Pat.
“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[13], 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[14],” said a voice from Ohio.
“He would not,” said Mr Button; “nor you afther me. Be damned[15] to the grog and thim that sells it!”
“It’s all darned easy to talk,[16]” said Ohio. “You curse the grog at sea when you can’t get it; set you ashore, and you’re bung full[17].”
“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, ‘storms you may escape, an’ wimmen you may escape, but the potheen ’ill have you
