“Extraordinary!” said Davy. “Aw, matey, matey, men’s only muck where women comes. Women is reg’lar eight-teen-carat goold. It’s me to know it too. There was the mawther herself now. My father was a bit of a rip--God forgive his son for saying it--and once he went trapsing after a girl and got her into trouble. An imperent young hussy anyway, but no matter. Coorse the mawther wouldn’t have no truck with her; but one day she died sudden, and then the child hadn’t nobody but the neighbors to look to it. ‘Go for it, Davy,’ says the mawther to me. It was evening, middling late after the herrings, and when I got to the kitchen windey there was the little one atop of the bed in her nightdress saying her bits of prayers; ‘God bless mawther, and everybody,’ and all to that. She couldn’t get out of the ‘mawther’ yet, being always used of it, and there never was no ‘father’ in her little tex’es. Poor thing! she come along with me, bless you, like a lammie that you’d pick out of the snow. Just hitched her hands round my neck and fell asleep in my arms going back, with her putty face looking up at the stars same as an angel’s--soft and woolly to your lips like milk straight from the cow, and her little body smelling sweet and damp, same as the breath of a calf. And when the mawther saw me she smoothed her brat and dried her hands, and catched at the little one, and chuckled over her, and clucked at her and kissed her, with her own face slushed like rain, till yer’d have thought nothing but it was one of her own that had been lost and was found agen. Aw, women for your life, mate, for forgiveness.’” Lovibond did not speak, and Davy began to laugh in a husky voice. “Bless me, the talk a man will put out when he’s a bit over the rope and thinking of ould times,” he said. “Sign that I’m thirsty,” he added; and then walked toward the window. “But the father could never forgive hisself,” he said, as he was stepping through, “and if I done wrong to a woman neither could I--I’ve that much of the ould man in me anyway.” When he got back to the room the air was dense with tobacco-smoke, and his guests were shouting for his company. “Capt’n Davy!” “Where’s Capt’n Davy?” “Aw, here’s the man himself?” “Been studying the stars, Capt’n?” “Well, that’s a bit of navigation.” “Navigation by starlight--I know the sort. Navigating up alongside a pretty girl, eh, Capt’n?” There were rough jokes, and strange stories, and more liquor and loud laughter, and for a time Davy took his part in everything. But after a while he grew quiet again, and absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out once more to Lovibond.