H. De Vere Stacpoole

English novelist Harold E. Bindloss spent a number of years in Western Canada during his youth. Because of these experiences, many of his novels deal with the prairies and their settlement. He produced over 30 such novels in addition to many other works, including In the Niger Country (1898), Wide Dominion (1899), Damaged Reputation (1908), Masters of the Wheat-Lands (1910), Carmen's Messenger (1917), The Girl From Keller's (1917), Sadie's Conquest (1918), Lister's Great Adventure (1920), Pine-Creek Ranch (1926), Border Trail (1931) Jungle Gold (1932) and Forbidden Rivers (1936).

Mr. Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the "Shan van vaught," and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the fo'cs'le deck. "O the Frinch are in the bay, Says the Shan van vaught." He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize - green in parts from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shell-back, round-shouldered, hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab about it. His face was like a moon, seen red through tropical mists; and as he played it wore an expression of strained attention as though the fiddle were telling him tales much more marvellous than the old bald statement about Bantry Bay. "Left-handed Pat," was his fo'cs'le name; not because he was left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong - or nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub - if a mistake was to be made, he made it. He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr. Button's nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in 'Frisco, though he had got drunk in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and been man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies about with him - they, and a very large stock of original innocence.

Foreward - I met Billy Haman on Circular Wharf, Sydney, so many yers ago that I think he must be dead. He is the chief person in the first six stories of this book, which have appeared illustrated in an Enalish, an American and a Canadian magazine, in all of which the illustrator diepicted Billy as a young, rather good-looking man. That he was not. Billy, when I met him, was well over forty, big and scrubby beareded, a shell-back with a touch of the Longshoreman, blue far seeing eyes, the eyes of a child-and an innocence none the less delightful because streaked with guile. Only the sea could have produced Billy, and the Islands and the Beaches and the life which the Pacific makes possible for an Ocean Tramp.

The story is written in the first person and starts with how as a young child of 9 Patrick was taken by his father a soldier from Ireland to France. Set not long after the battle of Waterloo the story is both a mystery over Patrick's origins and a tragedy. Patrick and Eloise are separated by more than misunderstandings will they ever be reconciled.