But Paddy O’Connell—why, nothing less than dancing a jig could satisfy Paddy O’Connell, or keep his feelings of joy in anything like control.
“Bedad!” he told a messmate many months afterwards, “if it hadn’t been for that jig I’d have bursted entoirely, and it’s the truth I’m telling ye, and never a word av a lie in it aither.”
Chapter Twenty Four.
“It is all like a Dream.”
The journey back from the inland sea to the Yack village had been full of adventure and toil, but all happy; and there is hardly anything a person will not do or encounter when buoyed up with hope and joy.
They had stayed for two weeks at the village, that the invalids might recruit their health and strength; and then, with her sails outspread to a favouring breeze, southward she sped, literally on the wings of the wind.
“It is all like a dream,” said Claude, as he sat by Meta’s side on the quarter-deck of the yacht Alba, one beautiful summer’s day just two months after the events related in the last chapter. “All like a dream, Meta.” The vessel was coasting along the western shores of Scotland, many miles off the point of Ardnamurchan.
