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232 boiling milk flung upon the raw meal—said it would be good like that. "Women said so, that will say anything." Sweetly they smiled, but they understood not the conditions. Oh fire that will not burn up! Oh kettle that will not boil! Oh egg that will crack when you drop it in! Oh one spoon that goeth a-missing! This, and much more "of this harness," as the Spaniard says, has kept me up till ten or later—till eleven, once, when the frying bacon, "in the very moment of projection," was breathed on by the flame of paraffin. (Nothing but paraffin will make a fire burn up in the Shetlands, and even that gets damp sometimes.) So that, having my notes to extend and decipher, and with hard boards, and the wind, and a flea or so, and sometimes the lumbago, I may say, with Comus, almost any night, "What has night to do with sleep?" but without being able to continue, for certainly it has no "better sweets to prove."

But perhaps I should have missed it in any case. Perhaps—nay, I will be certain of it, to lessen heartache—they went off in the night. To think of it! that young, tiny creature! And was it then, in the dark night, when the wind was blowing so furiously, that you were carried down—a little soft, fluffy, delicate-looking thing—to be put upon the great tumultuous sea? through mist and driving spray, with neither moon nor stars to light you, to toss, for the first time in life, on those tumbling, rough-playing waves? I, a grown man, was glad of all I could heap on my bed