"Daddy's a long time coming," said Dick all of a sudden.
They were seated on the baulks of timber that cumbered the deck of the brig on either side of the caboose. An ideal perch. The sun was setting over Australia way, in a sea that seemed like a sea of boiling gold.
Some mystery of mirage caused the water to heave and tremble as if troubled by fervent heat.
"Ay, is he," said Mr Button; "but it's better late than never. Now don't be thinkin' of him, for that won't bring him. Look at the sun goin' into the wather, and don't be spakin' a word, now, but listen and you'll hear it hiss."
The children gazed and listened, Paddy also. All three were mute as the great blazing shield touched the water that leapt to meet it.
You COULD hear the water hiss--if you had imagination enough. Once having touched the water, the sun went down behind it, as swiftly as a man in a hurry going down a ladder. As he vanished a ghostly and golden twilight spread over the sea, a light exquisite but immensely forlorn.
Then the sea became a violet shadow, the west darkened as if to a closing door, and the stars rushed over the sky.
"Mr Button," said Emmeline, nodding towards the sun as he vanished, "where's over there?"
"The west," replied he, staring at the sunset. "Chainy and Injee and all away beyant."
"Where's the sun gone to now, Paddy?" asked Dick.
"He's gone chasin' the moon, an' she's skedadlin' wid her dress brailed up for all she's worth; she'll be along up in a minit. He's always afther her, but he's never caught her yet."
"What would he do to her if he caught her?" asked Emmeline.
"Faith, an' maybe he'd fetch her a skelp an' well she'd desarve it."
"Why'd she deserve it?" asked Dick, who was in one of his questioning moods.
"Because she's always delutherin' people an' leadin' thim asthray.
Girls or men, she moidhers thim all once she gets the comeither on them; same as she did Buck M'Cann."
"Who's he?"
"Buck M'Cann? Faith, he was the village ijit where I used to live in the ould days."
"What's that'"
"Hould your whisht, an' don't be axin' questions. He was always wantin' the moon, though he was twinty an' six feet four. He'd a gob on him that hung open like a rat-trap with a broken spring, and he was as thin as a barber's pole, you could a' tied a reef knot in the middle of 'um; and whin the moon was full there was no houldin' him." Mr Button gazed at the reflection of the sunset on the water for a moment as if recalling some form from the past, and then proceeded. "He'd sit on the grass starin' at her, an' thin he'd start to chase her over the hills, and they'd find him at last, maybe a day or two later, lost in the mountains, grazin' on berries, and as green as a cabbidge from the hunger an' the cowld, till it got so bad at long last they had to hobble him."