MacWhirr's visits to his home were necessarily rare, and in the course of years he despatched other letters to his parents, informing them of his successive promotions and of his movements upon the vast earth. In these missives could be found sentences like this: “The heat here is very great.” Or: “On Christmas day at 4 P. M. we fell in with some icebergs.” The old people ultimately became acquainted with a good many names of ships, and with the names of the skippers who commanded them--with the names of Scots and English shipowners--with the names of seas, oceans, straits, promontories--with outlandish names of lumber-ports, of rice-ports, of cotton-ports--with the names of islands--with the name of their son's young woman. She was called Lucy. It did not suggest itself to him to mention whether he thought the name pretty. And then they died. The great day of MacWhirr's marriage came in due course, following shortly upon the great day when he got his first command. All these events had taken place many years before the morning when, in the chart-room of the steamer Nan-Shan, he stood confronted by the fall of a barometer he had no reason to distrust. The fall--taking into account the excellence of the instrument, the time of the year, and the ship's position on the terrestrial globe--was of a nature ominously prophetic; but the red face of the man betrayed no sort of inward disturbance. Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfilment had brought it home to his very door. “That's a fall, and no mistake,” he thought. “There must be some uncommonly dirty weather knocking about.”