not have taken over a moment or two, but I saw them all, plainly and distinctly. Solemnized yet strengthened by the sight, I was given a power I had not. I raised the craven, who was whining and sobbing, as high as my breast and flung him away as far as I could. Fortune favored him, he fell on a coil of rope, where he lay helpless. The steward went to him, wiped the blood from his eyes, and finally he was able to rise and, leaning on the steward’s left shoulder, shuffled to the cabin. By this time every man of my people able to leave the hold was on deck, an excited throng, eager for fighting. “If they lay a finger on yees for what ye’ve so nately done, we’ll break the heads av ivery wan o’ thim,” said a county Leitrim man to me, and I knew that was the spirit of them all. Softly opening the door of our little cabin I was thankful to find Aileen asleep. Getting a change of clothes, for those I had on were torn and bloodstained, I slipped out, had a wash in a bucket of saltwater, and then dressed myself. At breakfast I told Aileen all. She was much shocked at the danger I had run, and when satisfied I had received no greater injury than sundry black and blue bruises from kicks and blows and some handfuls of hair the coward had torn from my head, she became alarmed for the result. Assaulting an officer on shipboard I knew was a serious offence in the eyes of the law, and so did Aileen. “I don’t think,” I said to her, “you need fear their punishing me according to law, for they know if I am taken before a court, all the villainy of captain and mate towards the passengers would come out. They have broken the law in fifty ways, and know it. What I fear is the captain trying to take the law into his own hands before we reach Quebec.” We passed the day on deck as usual, appearing as unconcerned as might be. Whether the captain entertained any notion of arresting me, I cannot say, for he made no sign. The sight of a score or so of my people keeping nigh me wherever I moved, from whose coats peeped the end of what they called “a bit av a shtick,” may have had some influence in deterring him, but the real cause I opine to be what the boatswain whispered to me in the evening, that the steward had told the captain the sailors to a man would refuse to put a hand on me. They hate the mate, who, by the way, according to the cabin boy, is lying in his berth, alternately groaning with pain and swearing from rage. We made little progress today. The wind was ahead and we kept tacking every half hour or so. In beating up the river thus, a ship overhauled us. She was a Clyde trader, and being shorter she wore more quickly and being heavier laden sailed more closely to the wind, and owing to these advantages she outsailed us. As she passed us, her captain stood at the stern and dangled a rope to us, as if offering to take our ship in tow. Our captain, with an oath, rushed down the companionway to hide his mortification. In the afternoon a discovery