The weather was from the outset splendid, and the wind fair and steady. The ship sailed like a witch. “This Currency Lass is a powerful old girl, and has more complaints than I would care to put a name on,” the captain would say, as he pricked the chart; “but she could show her blooming heels to anything of her size in the Western Pacific.” To wash decks, relieve the wheel, do the day's work after dinner on the smoking-room table, and take in kites at night,--such was the easy routine of their life. In the evening--above all, if Tommy had produced some of his civilisation--yarns and music were the rule. Amalu had a sweet Hawaiian voice; and Hemstead, a great hand upon the banjo, accompanied his own quavering tenor with effect. There was a sense in which the little man could sing. It was great to hear him deliver _My Boy Tammie_ in Austrylian; and the words (some of the worst of the ruffian Macneil's) were hailed in his version with inextinguishable mirth. Where hye ye been a' dye? he would ask, and answer himself:-- I've been by burn and flowery brye, Meadow green an' mountain grye, Courtin' o' this young thing, Just come frye her mammie. It was the accepted jest for all hands to greet the conclusion of this song with the simultaneous cry: “My word!” thus winging the arrow of ridicule with a feather from the singer's wing. But he had his revenge with _Home, Sweet Home,_ and _Where is my Wandering Boy To-night?_--ditties into which he threw the most intolerable pathos. It appeared he had no home, nor had ever had one, nor yet any vestige of a family, except a truculent uncle, a baker in Newcastle, N.S.W. His domestic sentiment was therefore wholly in the air, and expressed an unrealised ideal. Or perhaps, of all his experiences, this of the Currency Lass, with its kindly, playful, and tolerant society, approached it the most nearly. It is perhaps because I know the sequel, but I can never think upon this voyage without a profound sense of pity and mystery; of the ship (once the whim of a rich blackguard) faring with her battered fineries and upon her homely errand, across the plains of ocean, and past the gorgeous scenery of dawn and sunset; and the ship's company, so strangely assembled, so Britishly chuckle-headed, filling their days with chaff in place of conversation; no human book on board with them except Hadden's Buckle, and not a creature fit either to read or to understand it; and the one mark of any civilised interest, being when Carthew filled in his spare hours with the pencil and the brush: the whole unconscious crew of them posting in the meanwhile towards so tragic a disaster.