Up in the little square of window one could see a patch of clear sky,
with white clouds crossing it, and a gust of the clean air of morning
was blown into our cell. Gib sat looking at it with his eyes
abstracted, so that I feared a renewal of his daftness.

"Can ye whistle 'Jenny Nettles,' sir?" he asked me civilly.

It was surely a queer request in that place and from such a fellow. But
I complied, and to the best of my skill rendered the air.

He listened greedily. "Ay, you've got it," he said, humming it after
me. "I aye love the way of it. Yon's the tune I used to whistle mysel'
on shipboard when the weather was clear."

He had the seaman's trick of thinking of the weather first thing in the
morning, and this little thing wrought a change in my view of him. His
madness was seemingly like that of an epileptic, and when it passed he
was a simple creature with a longing for familiar things.

"The wind's to the east," he said. "I could wish I were beating down
the Forth in the _Loupin' Jean._ She was a trim bit boat for him that
could handle her."

"Man," I said, "what made you leave a clean job for the ravings of
yesterday?"

"I'm in the Lord's hands," he said humbly. "I'm but a penny whistle for
His breath to blow on." This he said with such solemnity that the
meaning of a fanatic was suddenly revealed to me. One or two distorted