He said a good deal, but the matter really lay in small compass. The profession of arms is not highly paid. It was true that the pay was poor enough as a seaman, and the life far harder, but then he was only bound for each voyage. At other times he was his own master, and having "gained an insight into" trading from his late captain, he saw indefinite possibilities before him. Alister seemed to have great faith in openings, opportunities, chances, &c., and he said frankly that he looked upon his acquired seamanship simply as a means of paying his passage to any part of the habitable globe where fortunes could be made. "Then why not stick together?" cried Dennis. "Make your way up to Halifax with us, Alister dear. Maybe you'll find your cousin at home this time, and if not, at the worst, there's the captain of our old ship promised ye employment. Who knows but we'll all go home in her together? Ah, let's keep the Shamrock whole if we can." "But you see, Dennis," said the lieutenant, "Alister would regard a voyage to England as a step backward, as far as his objects are concerned." Dennis always maintained that you could never contrive to agree with Alister so closely that he would not find room to differ from you. So he nudged me again (and I kicked him once more), when Alister began to explain that he wouldn't just say _that_, for that during the two or three days when he was idle at Liverpool he had been into a free library to look at the papers, and had had a few words of converse with a decent kind of an old body, who was a care-taker in a museum where they bought birds and beasts and the like from seafaring men that got them in foreign parts. So that it had occurred to him that if he could pick up a few natural curiosities in the tropics, he might do worse, supposing his cousin be still absent from Halifax, than keep himself from idleness, by taking service in our old ship, with the chance of doing a little trading at the Liverpool Museum. "I wish I hadn't broken that gorgeous lump of coral Alfonso gave me," said Dennis. "But it's as brittle as egg-shell, though I rather fancy the half of it would astonish most museums. You're a wonderful boy, Alister! Ah, we'll all live to see the day when you're a millionaire, laying the foundation-stone of some of these big things the Aberdeen men build, and speechifying away to the rising generation of how ye began life with nothing but a stuffed Demerary parrot in your pocket. Willie, can't ye lend me some kind of a gun, that I may get him a few of these highly-painted fowl of the air? If I had but old Barney at my elbow now--GOD rest his soul!--we'd give a good account of ourselves among the cockatoos. Many's the lot of sea-birds we've brought home in the hooker to stuff the family pillows. But I'm no hand at preparing a bird for stuffing." "I'll cure them," said I; "the school-master taught me."