flourished long after the English fishery was dead; and even now muster a fleet of ships engaged in the same bold and hazardous calling.  Therefore, it is the more pleasant to me to be able to chronicle some of the doings of Captain Gilroy, familiarly known as “Paddy,” the master of the chance, who was unsurpassed as a whale-fisher or a seaman by any Yankee that ever sailed from Martha’s Vineyard.

He was a queer little figure of a man—­short, tubby, with scanty red hair, and a brogue thick as pea-soup.  Eccentric in most things, he was especially so in his dress, which he seemed to select on the principle of finding the most unfitting things to wear.  Rumour credited him with a numerous half-breed progeny—­ certainly he was greatly mixed up with the Maories, half his crew being made up of his dusky friends and relations by marriage.  Overflowing with kindliness and good temper, his ship was a veritable ark of refuge for any unfortunate who needed help, which accounted for the numerous deserters from Yankee whalers who were to be found among his crew.  Such whaling skippers as our late commander hated him with ferocious intensity; and but for his Maori and half-breed bodyguard, I have little doubt he would have long before been killed.  Living as he had for many years on that storm-beaten coast, he had become, like his Maories, familiar with every rock and tree in fog or clear, by night or day; he knew them, one might almost say, as the seal knows them, and feared them as little.  His men adored him.  They believed him capable of anything in the way of whaling, and would as soon have thought of questioning the reality of daylight as the wisdom of his decisions.

I went on board the evening of, our arrival, hearing some rumours of the doings of the old chance and her crew, also with the idea that perhaps I might find some countrymen among his very mixed crowd.  The first man I spoke to was Whitechapel to the backbone, plainly to be spotted as such as if it had been tattooed on his forehead.  Making myself at home with him, I desired to know what brought him so far from the “big smoke,” and on board a whaler of all places in the world.  He told me he had been a Pickford’s van-driver, but had emigrated to New Zealand, finding that he did not at all like himself in the new country.  Trying to pick and choose instead of manfully choosing a pick and shovel for a beginning, he got hard up.  During one of Captain Gilroy’s visits to the Bluff, he came across my ex-drayman, looking hungry and woebegone.  Invited on board to have a feed, he begged to be allowed to remain; nor, although his assistance was not needed, was he refused.  “An nar,” he said, his face glowing with conscious pride, “y’ort ter see me in a bloomin’ bowt.  I ain’t a-goain’ ter say as I kin fling wun o’ them ‘ere bloomin’ ‘arpoones like ar bowt-steerers kin; but I kin do my bit o’ grawft wiv enny on ’em—­don’tchu make no bloomin’ herror.”  The glorious