Strange that such a dull piece of still life should risk his life for a jacket--and an old one that had seen good service and was quite threadbare; but necessity replies, it was his only garment. A rich person can scarcely comprehend the magnitude of the loss of an only jacket to a poor man. No one was more amused by the adventure of the jacket than Stephen Corrie, who wrote a comic song on the subject, which Duncan the fiddler set to music, and used to sing, to the great annoyance of the hero of the tale, whenever he ventured in his shirt sleeves upon the deck. The Duncans, for there were two of them, were both highlanders, and played with much skill on the violin. They were two fine, honest, handsome fellows, who, with their music and singing kept all the rest alive. Directly the sun set, the lively notes of their fiddles called young and old to the deck, and Scotch reels, highland flings, and sailors' hornpipes were danced till late at night--often until the broad beams of the rising sun warned the revellers that it was time to rest. The Captain and the Lyndsays never joined the dancers; but it was a pretty sight to watch them leaping and springing, full of agility and life, beneath the clear beams of the summer moon. The foremost in these nightly revels was a young highlander called Tam Grant, who never gave over while a female in the ship could continue on her legs. If he lacked a partner he would seize hold of the old beldame, Granny Williamson, and twist and twirl her around at top speed, never heeding the kicking, scratching, and shrieking of the withered old crone. Setting to her, and nodding at her with the tassel of the red nightcap he wore, hanging so jauntily over his left eye, that it would have made the fortune of a comic actor to imitate--he was a perfect impersonification of mischief and wild mirth. By-and-by the old granny not only got used to his mad capers, but evidently enjoyed them; and used to challenge Tam for her partner; and if he happened to have engaged a younger and lighter pair of heels, she would retire to her den below, cursing him for a rude fellow, in no lullaby strains. And there was big Marion, a tall, stout, yellow-haired girl, from Berwickshire, who had ventured out all alone, to cross the wide Atlantic to join her brother in the far west of Canada, who was the admiration of all the sailors on board, and the adored of the two Duncans. Yet she danced just as lightly as a cow, and shook her fat sides and jumped and bounded through the Scotch reels, much in the same fashion that they did, when, "She up and wolloped o'er the green, For brawly she could frisk it." Marion had had many wooers since she came on board; but she laughed at all her lovers, and if they attempted to take any liberties with her, she threatened to call them out if they did not keep their distance, for she had "a lad o' her ain in Canada, an' she didna care a bodle for them an' their clavers."