“Silas Grig! Silas Grig!” cried Rory, one morning at breakfast, about a fortnight after the reunion, “sure you’re the best doctor that ever stepped in shoe-leather! No wonder we are all getting fat and rosy again! First you gave us a dose of hope—we got that before you jumped on board; then you gave us joy—a shake of your own honest hand, the sound of your own honest voice, and letters from home. What care I that my tenantry—‘the foinest pisintry in the world’—haven’t paid up? I’ve had letters from Arrandoon. What, Ray boy! more salmon and another egg? Just look at the effects of your physic, Dr Silas Grig!”
Silas laughed. “But,” he said, “there is one thing you haven’t mentioned.”
“Tell us,” said Rory: “troth, it’s a treat to hear ye talking?”
“The drop o’ green ginger,” said Silas.
Nor were these three weeks spent in idleness, for during that time the whole ship, from stem to stern, was redecorated; and when at last she was once more clear of the ice, once more out in the blue, she looked as bran new and as span new as on the day when she steamed down the wide, romantic Clyde.
I do not know any greater pleasure in life than that of being homeward bound after a long, long cruise at sea,—
“Good news from home, good news for me,
Has come across the deep blue sea.”
So runs the song. Good news from home is certainly one of the rover’s joys, but how much more joyous it is to be “rolling home, rolling home” to get that good news, eye to eye and lip to lip!
Once fairly under way, the weather seemed to get warmer every day. They reached Jan Mayen in a week; they found the rude village deserted, and Captain Cobb they would never be likely to meet again. So they left the island, and on the wings of a favouring breeze bore away for Iceland. Here Sandy McFlail, Doctor of Medicine of the University of Aberdeen, and surgeon of the good ship Arrandoon, begged to be left. Ah! poor Sandy was sadly in love with that blue-eyed, fair-haired Danish maiden. He fairly confessed to Rory, who had previously promised not to laugh at him, “that he had never seen a Scotch lassie to equal her, and that if she weren’t a ‘doctor’s leddy’ before six months were over it would not be his, Sandy McFlail’s, fault.”