left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong--
or nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub--if a
mistake was to be made, he made it.

He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him
and Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the
Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his
soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr Button's nature was
such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in 'Frisco,
though he had got drunk in most ports of the world, though he had
sailed with Yankee captains and been man-handled by Yankee
mates, he still carried his fairies about with him--they, and a
very large stock of original innocence.

Nearly over the musician's head swung a hammock from which
hung a leg; other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up
suggestions of lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene
lamp cast its light forward past the heel of the bowsprit to the
knightheads, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a
bunk, here a face from which protruded a pipe, here a breast
covered with dark mossy hair, here an arm tattooed.

It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships'
crews, and the fo'cs'le of the Northumberland had a full
company: a crowd of packet rats such as often is to be found on a
Cape Horner "Dutchmen" [sic] Americans--men who were farm
labourers and tending pigs in Ohio three months back, old
seasoned sailors like Paddy Button--a mixture of the best and the
worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small a
space as in a ship's fo'cs'le.