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"Father, here is a man who says the sun doesn't always shine in England."

The man gave me a fleeting embarrassed glance, and echoed, as if to shirk answering--

"In bare feet!"

"But it does, doesn't it? Tell him that it does," the child insisted.

Driven thus into a corner, the father turned his profile, avoiding my eyes, and said dully--

"The sun is always shining in England."

"Go on, father; tell him the rest."

"--and the use of candles, except as a luxury, is consequently unknown to the denizens of that favoured clime," he wound up, in the tone of a man who repeats an old, old lecture.

Johnny was turning to me triumphantly, when his father caught him by the hand and led him back to his dressing. The movement was hasty, almost rough. I stood at the cabin-door and looked after them.

We were fellow-passengers aboard the _Midas_, a merchant barque of near on a thousand tons, homeward bound from Cape Town; and we had lost sight of the Table Mountain but a couple of days before. It was the first week of the new year, and all day long a fier