me brother, and Buck fills the bucket again, and
there was the moon sure enough when the water came to stand still.

"`Go on,' says me brother. `Drain out the wather, but go gentle, or
she'll give yiz the slip again.'

"`Wan minit,' says Buck, `I've got an idea,' says he; `she won't give
me the slip this time,' says he. `You wait for me,' says he; and off he
hobbles to his old mother's cabin a stone's-throw away, and back he
comes with a sieve.

"`You hold the sieve,' says Buck, `and I'll drain the water into it; if
she 'scapes from the bucket we'll have her in the sieve.' And he pours
the wather out of the bucket as gentle as if it was crame out of a jug.
When all the wather was out he turns the bucket bottom up, and shook it.

"`Ran dan the thing!' he cries, `she's gone again'; an' wid that he
flings the bucket into the pond, and the sieve afther the bucket, when
up comes his old mother hobbling on her stick.

"`Where's me bucket?' says she.

"`In the pond,' say Buck.

"`And me sieve?' says she.

"`Gone afther the bucket.'

"`I'll give yiz a bucketin!' says she; and she up with the stick and
landed him a skelp, an' driv him roarin' and hobblin' before her, and
locked him up in the cabin, an' kep' him on bread an' wather for a wake
to get the moon out of his head; but she might have saved her thruble,
for that day month in it was agin. . . . There she comes!"

The moon, argent and splendid, was breaking from the water. She was
full, and her light was powerful almost as the light of day. The
shadows of the children and the queer shadow of Mr Button were cast on
the wall of the caboose hard and black as silhouettes.

"Look at our shadows!" cried Dick, taking off his broad-brimmed straw
hat and waving it.

Emmeline held up her doll to see ITS shadow, and Mr Button held up his
pipe.

"Come now," said he, putting the pipe back in his mouth, and making to
rise, "and shadda off to bed; it's time you were aslape, the both of
you."

Dick began to yowl.

"_I_ don't want to go to bed; I aint tired, Paddy--les's stay a little
longer."

"Not a minit," said the other, with all the decision of a nurse; "not a
minit afther me pipe's out!"

"Fill it again," said Dick.

Mr Button made no reply. The pipe gurgled as he puffed at it--a kind of
death-rattle speaking of almost immediate extinction.

"Mr Button!" said Emmeline. She was holding her nose in the air and
sniffing; seated to windward of the smoker, and