South-of-Ireland men, or even Orange-men. Himself he was
Presbyterian, while in his own community five men were all that

ever mustered at a meeting in the Orange Men's Hall. His community
was the Island McGill, where seven thousand of his kind lived in

such amity and sobriety that in the whole island there was but one
policeman and never a public-house at all.

Captain MacElrath did not like the sea, and had never liked it. He
wrung his livelihood from it, and that was all the sea was, the

place where he worked, as the mill, the shop, and the counting-
house were the places where other men worked. Romance never sang

to him her siren song, and Adventure had never shouted in his
sluggish blood. He lacked imagination. The wonders of the deep

were without significance to him. Tornadoes, hurricanes,
waterspouts, and tidal waves were so many obstacles to the way of a

ship on the sea and of a master on the bridge - they were that to
him, and nothing more. He had seen, and yet not seen, the many

marvels and wonders of far lands. Under his eyelids burned the
brazen glories of the tropic seas, or ached the bitter gales of the

North Atlantic or far South Pacific; but his memory of them was of
mess-room doors stove in, of decks awash and hatches threatened, of

undue coal consumption, of long passages, and of fresh paint-work
spoiled by unexpected squalls of rain.

"I know my buzz'ness," was the way he often put it, and beyond his
business was all that he did not know, all that he had seen with

the mortal eyes of him and yet that he never dreamed existed. That
he knew his business his owners were convinced, or at forty he

would not have held command of the Tryapsic, three thousand tons
net register, with a cargo capacity of nine thousand tons and

valued at fifty-thousand pounds.
He had taken up seafaring through no love of it, but because it had

been his destiny, because he had been the second son of his father
instead of the first. Island McGill was only so large, and the

land could support but a certain definiteproportion of those that
dwelt upon it. The balance, and a large balance it was, was driven

to the sea to seek its bread. It had been so for generations. The
eldest sons took the farms from their fathers; to the other sons

remained the sea and its salt-ploughing. So it was that Donald
MacElrath, farmer's son and farm-boy himself, had shifted from the

soil he loved to the sea he hated and which it was his destiny to
farm. And farmed it he had, for twenty years, shrewd, cool-headed,

sober, industrious, and thrifty, rising from ship's boy and
forecastle hand to mate and master of sailing-ships and thence into

steam, second officer, first, and master, from small command to
larger, and at last to the bridge of the old Tryapsic - old, to be

sure, but worth her fifty thousand pounds and still able to bear up
in all seas, and weather her nine thousand tons of freight.

From the bridge of the Tryapsic, the high place he had gained in
the competition of men, he stared at Dublin harbour opening out, at

the town obscured by the dark sky of the dreary wind-driven day,
and at the tangled tracery of spars and rigging of the harbour

shipping. Back from twice around the world he was, and from
interminable junketings up and down on far stretches, home-coming

to the wife he had not seen in eight-and-twenty months, and to the
child he had never seen and that was already walking and talking.

He saw the watch below of stokers and trimmers bobbing out of the
forecastle doors like rabbits from a warren and making their way

aft over the rusty deck to the mustering of the port doctor. They
were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like faces, and they

walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their feet as if the
clumsy brogans were too heavy for their lean shanks.

He saw them and he did not see them, as he passed his hand beneath
his visored cap and scratched reflectively his mop of sandy hair.

For the scene before him was but the background in his brain for
the vision of peace that was his - a vision that was his often

during long nights on the bridge when the old Tryapsic wallowed on
the vexed ocean floor, her decks awash, her rigging thrumming in

the gale gusts or snow squalls or driving tropic rain. And the
vision he saw was of farm and farm-house and straw-thatched

outbuildings, of children playing in the sun, and the good wife at
the door, of lowing kine, and clucking fowls, and the stamp of

horses in the stable, of his father's farm next to him, with,
beyond, the woodless, rolling land and the hedged fields, neat and

orderly, extending to the crest of the smooth, soft hills. It was
his vision and his dream, his Romance and Adventure, the goal of

all his effort, the high reward for the salt-ploughing and the
long, long furrows he ran up and down the whole world around in his

farming of the sea.
In simple taste and homelyinclination this much-travelled map was

more simple and homely than the veriest yokel. Seventy-one years
his father was, and had never slept a night out of his own bed in

his own house on Island McGill. That was the life ideal, so
Captain MacElrath considered, and he was prone to marvel that any

man, not under compulsion, should leave a farm to go to sea. To
this much-travelled man the whole world was as familiar as the

village to the cobbler sitting in his shop. To Captain MacElrath
the world was a village. In his mind's eye he saw its streets a

thousand leagues long, aye, and longer; turnings that doubled
earth's stormiest headlands or were the way to quiet inland ponds;

cross-roads, taken one way, that led to flower-lands and summer
seas, and that led the other way to bitter, ceaseless gales and the

perilous bergs of the great west wind drift. And the cities,
bright with lights, were as shops on these long streets - shops

where business was transacted, where bunkers were replenished,
cargoes taken or shifted, and orders received from the owners in

London town to go elsewhere and beyond, ever along the long sea-
lanes, seeking new cargoes here, carrying new cargoes there,

running freights wherever shillings and pence beckoned and
underwriters did not forbid. But it was all a weariness to

contemplate, and, save that he wrung from it his bread, it was
without profit under the sun.

The last good-bye to the wife had been at Cardiff, twenty-eight
months before, when he sailed for Valparaiso with coals - nine

thousand tons and down to his marks. From Valparaiso he had gone
to Australia, light, a matter of six thousand miles on end with a

stormy passage and running short of bunker coal. Coals again to
Oregon, seven thousand miles, and nigh as many more with general

cargo for Japan and China. Thence to Java, loading sugar for
Marseilles, and back along the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and

on to Baltimore, down to her marks with crome ore, buffeted by
hurricanes, short again of bunker coal and calling at Bermuda to

replenish. Then a time charter, Norfolk, Virginia, loading
mysterious contraband coal and sailing for South Africa under

orders of the mysterious German supercargo put on board by the
charterers. On to Madagascar, steaming four knots by the

supercargo's orders, and the suspicion forming that the Russian
fleet might want the coal. Confusion and delays, long waits at

sea, international complications, the whole world excited over the
old Tryapsic and her cargo of contraband, and then on to Japan and

the naval port of Sassebo. Back to Australia, another time charter
and general merchandise picked up at Sydney, Melbourne, and

Adelaide, and carried on to Mauritius, Lourenco Marques, Durban,
Algoa Bay, and Cape Town. To Ceylon for orders, and from Ceylon to

Rangoon to load rice for Rio Janeiro. Thence to Buenos Aires and
loading maize for the United Kingdom or the Continent, stopping at

St. Vincent, to receive orders to proceed to Dublin. Two years and
four months, eight hundred and fifty days by the log, steaming up

and down the thousand-league-long sea-lanes and back again to