14.--An eventful day, the consequences of which I fear, although, recalling every detail, I do not see how I could have acted otherwise. Anxious to see this country, so new and bright to me, I rose at daylight. The ship was under plain sail, beating against a northwest wind, and making little headway. One of our lads who had been taken to help the sailors was ordered by the mate up the foremast to put to rights some tackle that had got entangled in the last tack. The boy blundered, and the mate repeated the order with his customary oaths. Again the lad tried to do what he was bid and failed. Ordering a sailor to go up and do the work, the mate shouted to the boy to come down. He did so reluctantly, for he saw the mate had grasped a rope’s end. Cursing him for his slowness, the mate seized his feet while still in the ratlines. He fell violently on the deck, when the mate proceeded to shower blows with the heavy rope on the head and back of the boy, who cried piteously for mercy. I could not stand it; my blood was boiling. “Stop,” I shouted, “have pity on the boy; he did not mean to disobey your order. It was his sorrow for his mother who died last night that confused him.” The mate paused in his lashing of the lad and glared at me with such a malignant look as I pray the saints I may never again have cast on me. “Mind your business, damn you, or I’ll have you put in irons for mutiny,” he shouted and again laid the rope across the lad’s quivering body with fiercer strength. It was, perhaps, foolish for my own interests but I could not help it. I sprang at the mate and dealt him a blow in the face. He clutched hold of me and we grappled. He was strong, with muscles toughened by fighting sea and wind, but a Sligo boy of my inches will take odds from no man in a wrestle. We fell time and again, he beneath me, but he always managed to wriggle up again, until I got a good hold of his neck, then I bent him under me and rained blows on every part of him my right fist could reach. All that the cheating villain had done, his cruelties to my people, his brutal indifference to their sufferings, flashed across my mind, and lent vim to every blow I dealt. How the scoundrel howled for help and, finally, for mercy. Not one of the sailors interfered. They drew off to the forepeak and looked on, glad to see his punishment. The passengers who were on deck formed in a circle around us, delighted at the sight. One of them, I recall, popped up from the hatchway and held out a blackthorn to me with the explanation, “To finish him off wid, yer honor.” I needed no shillelah. The fear that I might fatally injure the bully alone caused me to pause. I gathered him up in my arms for a final effort, when a strange thing happened me. I saw in my mind’s eye, as they passed before me, the white face of one after the other of the dead I helped to drop into the sea. It was one of those freaks the imagination plays when the mind is intensely excited. This could