eems good is pretty often uncommon bad."

"You are a walking dictionary of truisms, father! I suppose you mean to
take a philosophical view of the misfortune and make the best of it,"
said Nigel, with what we may style one of his twinkling smiles, for on
nearly all occasions that young man's dark, brown eyes twinkled, in
spite of him, as vigorously as any "little star" that was ever told in
prose or song to do so--and much more expressively, too, because of the
eyebrows of which little stars appear to be destitute.

"No, lad," retorted the captain; "I take a common-sense view--not a
philosophical one; an' when you've bin as long at sea as I have, you'll
call nothin' a misfortune until it's proved to be such. The only
misfortune I have at present is a son who cannot see things in the same
light as his father sees 'em."

"Well, then, according to your own principle that is the reverse of a
misfortune, for if I saw everything in the same light that you do, you'd
have no pleasure in talking to me, you'd have no occasion to reason me
out of error, or convince me of truth. Take the subject of poetry,
now--"

"Luff;" said Captain Roy, sternly, to the man at the wheel.

When the man at the wheel had gone through the nautical evolution
involved in "luff," the captain turned to his son and said
abruptly--"We'll run for the Cocos-Keelin' Islands, Nigel, an' refit."

"Are the Keeling Islands far off?"

"Lift up your head and look straight along the bridge of your nose, lad,
and you'll see them. They're an interesting group, are the Keelin'
Islands. Volcanic, they are, with a coral top-dressin', so to speak.
Sit down here an' I'll tell 'ee about 'em."

Nigel shut up the telescope through which he had been examining the
thin, blue line on the horizon that indicated the islands in question,
and sat down on the cabin skylight beside his father.

"They've got a romantic history too, though a short one, an' are set
like a gem on the bosom of the deep blue sea."

"Come, father, you're drifting out of your true course--that's
poetical!"

"I know it, lad, but I'm only quotin' your mother. Well, you must know
that the Keelin' Islands--we call them Keelin' for short--were
uninhabited between fifty and sixty years ago, when a Scotsman named
Ross, thinking them well situated as a port of call for the repair and
provisioning of vessels on their way to Australia and China, set his
heart on them and quietly took possession in th