anything to distinguish himself beyond his messmates; but on this
particular day O'Riley's star was in the ascendant, and fortune seemed
to have singled him out as an object of her special attention. He was a
short man, and a broad man, and a particularly _rugged_ man--so to
speak. He was all angles and corners. His hair stuck about his head in
violently rigid and entangled tufts, rendering it a matter of wonder how
anything in the shape of a hat could stick on. His brow was a countless
mass of ever-varying wrinkles, which gave to his sly visage an aspect of
humorous anxiety that was highly diverting--and all the more diverting
when you came to know that the man had not a spark of anxiety in his
composition, though he often said he had. His dress, like that of most
Jack tars, was naturally rugged, and he contrived to make it more so
than usual.

"An' it's hot, too, it is," he continued, applying his kerchief again to
his pate "If it warn't for the ice we stand on, we'd be melted down, I
do belave, like bits o' whale blubber."

"Wot a jolly game football is, ain't it?" said Davie seating himself on
a hummock, and still panting hard.

"Ay, boy, that's jist what it is. The only objiction I have agin it is,
that it makes ye a'most kick the left leg clane off yer body."

"Why don't you kick with your right leg, then, stupid, like other
people?" inquired Summers.

"Why don't I, is it? Troth, then, I don't know for sartin. Me father
lost his left leg at the great battle o' the Nile, and I've sometimes
thought that had somethin' to do wid it. But then me mother was lame o'