Para Handy E-Book

Neil Munro

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 895

Beschreibung

Para Handy has been sailing his way into the affections of generations of Scots since he first weighed anchor in the pages of the Glasgow Evening News in 1905. The master mariner and his crew - Dougie the mate, Macphail the engineer, Sunny Jim and the Tar - all play their part in evoking the irresistible atmosphere of a bygone age when puffers sailed between West Highland ports and the great city of Glasgow. This definitive edition contains all three collections published in the author's lifetime, as well as those that were unpublished and a new story which was discovered in 2001. Extensive notes accompany each story, providing fascinating insights into colloquialisms, place-names and historical events. This volume also includes a wealth of contemporary photographs, depicting the harbours, steamers and puffers from the age of the Vital Spark.

Leseprobe

This edition first published in 2015 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

This anthology first published in 1992 by Birlinn Ltd

Introductory materialCopyright © the Estate of Brian D. Osborne and theEstate of Ronald Armstrong 1992 and 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 311 2eISBN 978 0 85790 711 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text (UK) Ltd, EdinburghPrinted and bound by Grafica Veneta (www.graficaveneta.com)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Para’s World

Para’s Places

The Humour of ‘Para Handy’

Para in Print

Neil Munro

Acknowledgements

THE VITAL SPARK

  1Para Handy, Master Mariner  2The Prize Canary  3The Malingerer  4Wee Teeny  5The Mate’s Wife  6Para Handy – Poacher  7The Sea Cook  8Lodgers on a House-boat  9A Lost Man10Hurricane Jack11Para Handy’s Apprentice12Queer Cargoes

THE BIRTHPLACE OF PARA HANDY

13In Search of a Wife14Para Handy’s Piper15The Sailors and the Sale

THE CAREER OF CAPTAIN PETER MACFARLANE

16A Night Alarm17A Desperate Character18The Tar’s Wedding19A Stroke of Luck

PARA’S OPINIONS

20Dougie’s Family21The Baker’s Little Widow22Three Dry Days23The Valentine that Missed Fire24The Disappointment of Erchie’s Niece25Para Handy’s Wedding

IN HIGHLAND HARBOURS WITH PARA HANDY

26A New Cook27Pension Farms28Para Handy’s Pup29Treasure Trove30Luck31Salvage for the Vital Spark32Para Handy Has an Eye to Business33A Vegetarian Experiment34The Complete Gentleman35An Ocean Tragedy36The Return of the Tar37The Fortune-teller38The Hair Lotion

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND THE CREW OF THE VITAL SPARK

39Para Handy and the Navy40Piracy in the Kyles41Among the Yachts42Fog43Christmas on the Vital Spark44The Maids of Bute45Herring – a Gossip46To Campbeltown by Sea47How to Buy a Boat48The Stowaway49Confidence50The Goat51Para Handy’s Vote

HURRICANE JACK OF THE VITAL SPARK

52Hurricane Jack53The Mystery Ship54Under Sealed Orders55A Search for Salvage56The Wonderful Cheese57The Phantom Horse and Cart58Hurricane Jack’s Luck-bird59A Rowdy Visitor60The Fenian Goat61Land Girls62Leap Year on the Vital Spark63Bonnie Ann64The Leap-year Ball65The Bottle King66‘Mudges’67An Ocean Tragedy68Freights of Fancy69Summer-time on the Vital Spark70Eggs Uncontrolled71Commandeered72Sunny Jim Rejected73How Jim Joined the Army74The Fusilier75Para Handy, MD76A Double Life77The Wet Man of Muscadale

PARA AND THE ‘SCRUPTURES’

78Initiation79The End of the World80The Captured Cannon81An Ideal Job

UNCOLLECTED STORIES 1905–24

82Para Handy’s Shipwreck83The Vital Spark’s Collision84Para Handy at the Poll85The Vital Spark at the Celebration86War-time on the Vital Spark87The Three Macfadyens88Running the Blockade89The Canister King90Thrift on the Vital Spark91Difficulties in the Dry Area92Truth About the Push93Foraging for the Vital Spark94Our Gallant Allies95Para Handy’s Spectacles96Para Handy in the Egg Trade97Sunny Jim Returns98Hurricane Jack’s Shootings99Wireless on the Vital Spark100Para Handy on Yachting

Notes

List of Illustration

Neil Munro c. 1907 (The Baillie)

Puffer Saxon (East Dunbartonshire Libraries)

TSS King Edward (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Launch of puffer Briton at Kirkintilloch (East Dunbartonshire Libraries)

Steamers leaving Broomielaw, Glasgow (Editors’ collection)

Cargo steamer in Loch Fyne (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Arrochar, Loch Long (West Dunbartonshire Libraries)

Among the yachts (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

The Kyles of Bute (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Tarbert, Loch Fyne (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

To Campbeltown by sea (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Carradale, Kintyre (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Gabbarts at Bowling Harbour (West Dunbartonshire Libraries)

Gourock Harbour (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

The Clyde at Glasgow (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Inveraray – Neil Munro’s birthplace (Editors’ collection)

PS Columba at Ardrishaig (Editors’ collection)

‘Take Clynder . . . or any other place in the Gareloch’ (Mudges) (Editors’ collection)

‘They’re jist at big-gun practice’ (Para and the Navy) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

‘Where were they bound for? Was’t Kirkintilloch?’ (Queer Cargoes) (East Dunbartonshire Libraries)

‘I’ll bate ye he’s gaun to the Scottish Exhibeetion’ (The Stowaway) (Mitchell Library, Glasgow)

‘I will go over and see my good sister at Helensburgh’ (Para Handy, Master Mariner) (West Dunbartonshire Libraries)

‘There’s no much fun in Tobermory in the summer time’ (Treasure Trove) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

‘The place for life in them days’ (Herring: A Gossip) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

‘It was Glasgow Fair Saturday’ (Wee Teeny) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

‘A handy wife at the guttin’ ’ (Herring: A Gossip) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

‘Jack went ashore . . . on an urgent search for milk and butter’ (A Rowdy Visitor) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Brodick Pier and Goat Fell (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

‘High jeenks and big hauls’ (Herring: A Gossip) (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Lochgoilhead (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

The Pier, Dunoon (Argyll & Bute Libraries)

Foreword

The remarkable endurance of the ‘Para Handy’ stories, which still attract a wide audience more than ninety years after their first appearance in the Glasgow Evening News, is testified to by the collected stories remaining in print throughout this period. Apart from the continuing popularity of the stories, however, there are two reasons for suggesting that readers will find this volume useful.

Firstly we hope to rehabilitate some of Munro’s literary reputation, once considerable and largely based on his historical novels, but we believe properly owing as much to these shorter pieces.

Along with the reading public’s appetite for the West Highland tales goes a wider celebrity, amounting almost to notoriety, which owes much to the television adaptations of recent years. At any rate the man in the street has an image of Para Handy and a range of quotations and anecdote based on the character or its televised representation even if he has never read the stories. We are unaware of any other collection of Scots comic prose which enjoys such a lasting and secure place in the affections of the public.

Paradoxically, though, Munro’s creation can be termed neglected, since few critics have taken the stories seriously. The only Munro with an entry in Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature is H. H. Munro (‘Saki’). Furthermore Munro seems to have set the tone for the undervaluing of these stories by his publishing them under the pen-name of ‘Hugh Foulis’.

Secondly, and as importantly, we feel that present-day readers, while relishing the vivid and highly accessible comedy of character and dialogue, will appreciate the stories more fully with an understanding of the background and an explanation of the many specific references to contemporary people and events. These tales have a richly observed setting, rooted in time and place, and the largely vanished Glasgow, Clyde and West Highland world of the Vital Spark needs and deserves describing and illustrating.

The explanatory notes also look at such intriguing questions as: where was Para Handy born; what were his religious views; what did he think of international affairs; what did he do before becoming skipper of the Vital Spark?

Also included are eighteen stories, rescued from the pages of the Glasgow Evening News, which were never included in the three original separate volumes of stories or any of the complete editions published in the last fifty years.

Brian D. Osborne,Ronald Armstrong,1992

Para’s World

No one, surely, reads these stories for the social history when there are so many other good reasons, yet a clear picture emerges of a lost world of West Highland villages bound together by the sea and the vessels on it. In late Victorian or Edwardian times (the period covered by the stories is roughly 1900–20) these communities were enjoying a golden age of water transport. Along Munro’s native Loch Fyneside alone there were seven piers and yet other places where a boat came out to meet the steamer.

A winter service was kept up but it was the holiday trade which made the steamers profitable. Munro’s description of a typical July Saturday, which appears in ‘Wee Teeny’, is worth quoting here for its characteristically colourful account of a scene which could be repeated at any one of scores of piers from Craigendoran to Campbeltown.

The last passenger steamer to sail that day from Ardrishaig was a trip from Rothesay. It was Glasgow Fair Saturday and Ardrishaig Quay was black with people. There was a marvellously stimulating odour of dulse, herring and shell-fish, for everybody carried away in a handkerchief a few samples of these marine products that are now the only sea-side souvenirs not made in Germany. The Vital Spark in ballast, Clydeward bound, lay inside the passenger steamer, ready to start when the latter had got under weigh, and Para Handy and his mate meanwhile sat on the fo’c’sle-head of ‘the smertest boat in the tred’ watching the frantic efforts of lady excursionists to get their husbands on the steamer before it was too late, and the deliberate efforts of the said husbands to slink away up the village again just for one more drink. Wildly the steamer hooted from her siren, fiercely clanged her bell, vociferously the captain roared upon his bridge, people aboard yelled eagerly to friends ashore to hurry up, and the people ashore as eagerly demanded to know what all the hurry was about, and where the bleezes was Wull. Women loudly defied the purser to let the ship go away without their John, for he had paid his money for his ticket, and though he was only a working-man his money was as good as anybody else’s; and John, on the quay, with his hat thrust back on his head, his thumbs in the armhole of his waistcoat and a red handkerchief full of dulse at his feet, gave display of step-dancing that was responsible for a great deal of the congestion of traffic at the shore end of the gangway.

This description, with its colour, vitality and shrewd observation could almost be from The Pickwick Papers.

At the same time the gabbarts, and later the steam puffers, were attending to the more essential needs of these coastal communities. The puffer was generally thought of as a coal boat, but could also be pressed into carrying a tremendous variety of goods. If we are to believe her skipper the Vital Spark was suited to carrying ‘nice genteel luggage for the shooting lodges’ as did the doyenne of steamers, the Columba, but in practice the cargoes were more likely to be ‘coals and whunstone, and oak bark, and timber, and trash like that’. She did take a farmer’s flitting on at least one occasion, though, and her mixed cargo included everything ‘from bird cages to cottage pianos’.

A life in the ‘coastin’ tred’ was hard and dirty no doubt, but you might not suppose so from a quick glance at these stories. Para, Dougie and the rest of the crew, ‘Brutain’s hardy sons’ each and every one, certainly are seen now and then battling against a gale but usually the picture is of a leisurely life – ‘we went into Greenock for some marmalade, and did we no’ stay three days’. In harbour there was from time to time some conflict between the skipper and the crew. Para, with an eye to enhancing the ship’s reputation as the ‘smertest boat in the tred’, would often wish some painting to be done, while the crew, if in funds, would rather go ashore and relax in a harbour-side inn.

When the crew were at their ease, they would sit in the fo’c’sle, a small triangular space in the bows of the ship which acted as cabin, galley and mess-room for the four man crew, and tell a baur or two of ‘all the seas that lie between Bowling and Stornoway’.

Para’s Places

Turn to the section on ‘Para in Print’ to discover that Munro’s stories, appearing as they did in an evening newspaper, were written with an eye to topical events and personalities; very much of their time. They were, however, even more firmly rooted in a sense of place.

Just how deep were Munro’s knowledge and affection for ‘Para’s Places’ we can guess from a glimpse of his 1907 publication The Clyde, River and Firth. This popular account, perhaps rather over-written to modern taste, gives a lyrical description of the river from its source to Ailsa Craig. A few extracts from its pages provide an interesting commentary on the setting in which Munro placed the captain and his crew. And firstly . . .

GLASGOW

A mighty place for trade . . .; with a stern and arid Sabbath; and a preposterous early hour for the closing of public houses.

In the stories, Glasgow is where Para goes to get his orders from the Vital Spark’s owner; it is also home for the crew, who seldom venture out of the relatively circumscribed area of the harbour and the housing areas nearby like Gorbals, Plantation and Finnieston. On either side of

a fairway of 620 feet at its widest and 362 at its narrowest point . . . the harbour life slops over its actual precincts, and the neighbouring streets . . . bear a marine impress. Their tall ‘lands’ of flats fed from a common stair are the homes of folk whose men are on the quays.

In ‘Dougie’s Family’ Munro informs us that the mate, and his wife and ten children, live up one of these common stairs in the Plantation area, and in the very next tenement lives Dan Macphail and his family. Even the captain goes to live in Glasgow after his marriage to the baker’s little widow. At other times we hear of ‘baals’ and similar ‘high jeenks’ at, presumably, the Highlanders’ Institute; a canary is purchased at the Bird Market; and of course the ‘Highlandman’s Umbrella’ is used as a meeting place for exiles from the north. As Para says, ‘its Gleska for gaiety, if you have the money’.

Neil Munro was a working journalist before anything else and his Glasgow and its river are seen from the perspective which comes from first-hand experience. Undoubtedly he haunted the ferries, lingered on the quays among sailors of all nations and gazed at the cargoes loading and unloading in the harbour of what was then the second city of the Empire.

Yet perhaps more than just a working journalist, even in the cub reporter days; a poet perhaps, a Conrad or an Orwell before his time? (Though not exactly ‘Down and Out in Glasgow’.) Examine this characteristic passage from The Clyde and speculate:

Nor even then can one rightly comprehend the harbour who has not brooded beside sheer-leg and crane-jib that are mightily moving enormous weights as if they had been toys; swallowed the coal-dust of the docks, dodged traction engines, eaten Irish stew for breakfast in the Sailors’ Home, watched Geordie Geddes trawl for corpses, sat in the fo’c’sles of ‘tramps’, stood in a fog by the pilot on the bridge, heard the sorrows of a Shore Superintendent and the loyal lies of witnesses in a Board of Trade examination, who feel bound to ‘stick by the owners’ and swear their engines backed ten minutes before the accident; or sat on a cask in the Prince’s Dock on peaceful Sabbath mornings when the shipping seemed asleep, or an unseen concertina played some sailor’s jig for canticle.

Did the memory of the ‘unseen concertina’ provide an inspiration for our jaunty character Sunny Jim? It is a jig-tune he plays on his ‘bonny wee melodeon’ to accompany the dancing sausages in the story ‘A New Cook’ which first appeared a few months after the publication of The Clyde, River and Firth.

THE UPPER RIVER

The stretch of the river from Bowling to Greenock features in several of the tales. Although never stated, the Vital Spark’s home port would seem to have been Bowling, although she frequently called in at Greenock for orders and cargoes. Although the puffer design was based on the necessity to pass through the seventy-foot locks on the Forth and Clyde Canal, the Vital Spark was an ‘outside boat’ and we have but one record of the crew negotiating the canal.

THE FIRTH OF CLYDE

The wider Firth was where the courses of the elegant passenger steamers of Messrs. MacBrayne and the railway companies crossed that of the workaday Vital Spark. The great fin de siècle holiday boom had led to the expansion of resorts such as Largs, Millport and Rothesay. Newer watering places had grown up alongside older communities and the steam puffer came into its own as a workhorse to bring in the building materials and fuel. Neil Munro described all this in The Clyde, River and Firth while in his fictional recreation of this world Para Handy is to be found ploughing all the waters of the estuary.

Down to ARRAN, for example; Para has a wager with a Brodick man about a singing canary and returns with a ‘cargo of grevel’ to collect his bet. It is also in Arran that we first hear of Hurricane Jack, that larger than life character, ‘as weel kent in Calcutta as if he wass in the Coocaddens’, stealing ‘wan smaal wee sheep’ from the shore on the island’s west coast at Catacol.

Elsewhere, at the head of LOCH LONG the Arrochar midges are so fierce one night that they provoke the captain to such hyperbole as to make ‘Mudges’ a favourite tale with anyone who has visited the west coast in high summer.

LOCH FYNE

The Clyde’s longest sea-loch is the real centre of Para Handy’s world. About one half of the stories have a connection with this area and Para himself may have been born there. However, for a fuller discussion of this point, see the notes to ‘In Search of a Wife’.

Go to Loch Fyne now and to the uninitiated it may seem like a sleepy backwater, but to the devoted readers of these tales almost every placename has its delightful associations: busy TARBERT – where Para met the spae-wife at the Fair and where he fell foul of the law for sounding the ship’s whistle at 2 a.m.; quiet CAIRNDOW – where ‘they keep the two New Years’; and perhaps most magical of all, FURNACE – ‘where you don’t need tickets for a baal as long as you ken the man at the door and taalk the Gaalic at him’.

You might, today, follow the ‘Royal Route’ from the Clyde to Ardrishaig, through the Crinan Canal and out into West Highland waters through the Dorus Mor, the ‘Great Gate’, sailing perhaps as far as Mull, where at Tobermory the enterprising crew sold tickets to look at the whale. There is indeed much charm in the descriptions of these more distant scenes; however in reading this book you must, above all, know your Loch Fyne as it was in the heyday of the herring fishing, that legendary time of ‘high jeenks and big hauls; you werena very smert if you werena into both of them’.

. . . many generations of Loch Fyneside men have followed a vocation which has much of the uncertainty of backing horses without so much amusement. Towns like Inveraray, Lochgilphead, and Tarbert grew up, as it were, round the fishing smacks that in old days ran into their bays for shelter, and Minard, Crarae, Lochgair, Castle Lachlan, Strachur, and other villages on either side of the Loch depend to some extent for their existence on the silver harvest of the sea.

The Humour of ‘Para Handy’

Almost all of the comic flavour of these stories is to be found in the dialogue rather than in the narrative, and no part of the dialogue is more important than Para Handy’s own contribution. Into the mouth of his skipper, Munro has put any amount of humorous anecdotes and reflections, so much so that some of the stories are virtually monologues. For example, although it may be a matter of taste, to many readers the semi-mythical Hurricane Jack as described by Para with a ‘back on him like a shipping box’ is preferable to the Jack who later makes a personal appearance in the stories.

Para’s speech is of course given a fine exotic touch by the fact that he, and Dougie the mate, have ‘the Gaalic’. (No lover of these stories could, with the wealth of examples provided, commit the solecism of pronouncing Gaelic as ‘Gaylic’!)

While there may be a touch of the stage Highlander about such ‘Handyisms’ as ‘chust sublime’ and ‘high jeenks’, that is really only another way of saying that the captain is a larger-than-life character. He is an original, curiously reminiscent of a Dickensian character such as Sam Weller or one of Sir Walter Scott’s Doric speakers. In a more far-fetched way Para also has a certain resemblance to ‘the wily Odysseus’, another sea-farer who roamed among sea-girt islands, had an adventure with sheep and who ‘had rather a gallant way with the sex, generally said “mem” to them all . . .’

Para, too, is no stranger to exaggeration, but more often it is an appreciative ‘baur’ of epic proportions about the mighty Hurricane Jack who

. . . iss a man that can sail anything and go anywhere, and aalways be the perfect chentleman. A millionaire’s yat or a washinboyne – it’s aal the same to Jeck . . . And never anything else but ’lastic sided boots, even in the coorsest weather . . .

Much of the humour of the stories lies in the juxtaposition of the Highland characters, Para and Dougie, and the Lowland figures, the Tar, Sunny Jim and, particularly, Macphail the Engineer (who, despite his Highland surname, is a low country man, from Mother-well in industrial Lanarkshire). Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve) has written of the ‘Caledonian antizyzygy’ – the contrast or conflict between the two competing strains within the Scottish personality. In the tensions between the romantic, generous, imaginative Highland skipper and the thrawn, prosaic Lowland engineer we see a fine example of the contrast between the two races:

Do you know the way it iss that steamboat enchineers is alwaays doon in the mooth like that? It’s the want of nature. They never let themselves go. Poor duvvles, workin’ away among their bits o’ enchines, they never get the wind and sun aboot them right the same ass us seamen.

Additional piquancy is given to the situation by Macphail, the severely practical engineer, having a none-too-secret passion for the most lurid penny novelettes.

A new dimension comes into the stories with the arrival of the Glaswegian Sunny Jim. As the Tar’s replacement, Davie Green, to give him his full name for once, is more than good value. He it is who devises the Tobermory whale exhibition and starts the persecution of the captain after the death of the cockatoo in ‘An Ocean Tragedy’:

If it’s no’ murder, it’s manslaughter; monkeys, cockatoos, and parrots a’ come under the Act o’ Parliament. A cockatoo’s no’ like a canary; it’s able to speak the language and give an opeenion, and the man that wad kill a cockatoo wad kill a wean.

The persecution or ‘roasting’ of Para by his crew is a most amusing example of a traditional kind of Scottish humour; something kindlier than satire and more subtle than ridicule. It may be descended from the ancient Scottish literary custom of ‘flyting’ as found in the poems of Dunbar and his contemporaries and survives to this day in the innocent sport found in every workplace of ‘taking a loan of ’ someone and in its latest form ‘winding someone up’. To wind a workmate up, as his shipmates do to Dougie in ‘Dougie’s Family’, is to lead him on to make statements or commit indiscretions which will provide further scope for innocent amusement.

Curiously enough Para Handy has not himself had many imitators, except perhaps in a coincidental way in Sean O’Casey’s Captain Jack Boyle, who actually was ‘only wanst on the watter, on an old collier from here to Liverpool’.

Para in Print

Every Monday the ‘Looker-On’ column in the Glasgow Evening News gave Neil Munro the chance to reflect on current events, to air his views or to entertain with a short story. On Monday, 16 January 1905 a new and enduring character in Scottish fiction was launched on the public:

A short, thick-set man, with a red beard, a hard round felt hat ridiculously out of harmony with a blue pilot jacket and trousers and a seaman’s jersey . . .

In short, Para Handy, Master Mariner, had arrived.

At intervals of two or three weeks during 1905 and the early months of 1906 a further instalment in the saga of the Vital Spark and her crew appeared to brighten the Glaswegians’ Mondays. How quickly Para and the Vital Spark became an accepted part of Glasgow life, of local folklore almost, may be judged from a cartoon which appeared in the News on 9 August 1905. Headlined ‘The Next Tramway Extension’, it was a comment on the recent gift of the Ardgoil Estate to the City of Glasgow and shows a Glasgow Corporation tramcar mounted on a ship named Vital Spark and headed downriver to the new Argyllshire property. In less than eight months and after only thirteen stories Munro’s creation had so completely come to life that the Vital Spark had become a name that a cartoonist could use without explanation or sub-title.

By the spring of 1906 William Blackwood & Sons were arranging for the publication of the first anthology of Para stories: twenty-two tales which originally appeared in the News and three stories – ‘Lodgers on a Houseboat’, ‘The Disappointment of Erchie’s Niece’ and ‘Para Handy’s Wedding’ – written especially for the book.

One other News story from this period, ‘The Maids of Bute’, was held over and appeared in the second anthology, In Highland Harbours with Para Handy, S.S. Vital Spark, in 1911. The final anthology, Hurricane Jack of the Vital Spark, did not appear until 1923. The omnibus edition of the Para stories, the Erchie stories and the tales of Jimmy Swan, which was the first to formally link Munro, rather than ‘Hugh Foulis’, with these stories, appeared in 1931, the year after Munro’s death.

The order of stories in the 1906 anthology bore little relationship to the original order of newspaper publication – except that ‘Para Handy, Master Mariner’, the first story in the book, was also the first story to appear in the News. Some stories had obvious topicality, for example ‘Three Dry Days’, which is set in February, that odd month when, as Dougie says, ‘. . . the New Year’s no’ right bye, and the Gleska Fair’s chust comin’ on . . .’, appeared on 5 February 1906 and its companion piece, ‘The Valentine that Misfired’, came out on 19 February, as close to St Valentine’s Day as the Monday publication schedule for the ‘Looker-On’ column would allow.

Two of the extra stories written for the anthology would seem to have had particular aims. ‘The Disappointment of Erchie’s Niece’ reintroduces the reader to Erchie Macpherson from the ‘Erchie, My Droll Friend’ series. Munro had published an anthology of Erchie stories in 1904 and this was perhaps an attempt to link the two sets of stories, with benefit to the sales of both volumes.

Another of the new stories written for book publication, ‘Para Handy’s Wedding’, is clearly an extremely appropriate way to round off the volume. It perhaps, in view of Munro’s very limited interest in these humorous sketches, was also meant to end the career of Peter Macfarlane.

However, like another contemporary writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who also considered that his historical novels were his most important work and his short stories of lesser worth, the character refused to be killed. Just as Holmes survived the Reichenbach Falls, so Para survives marriage to the Widow Crawford and to our delight continues to sail the west coast for many years.

If the newspaper publication of the stories had been an obvious success, so too was their appearance in book form. The News in a regular weekly book feature, the ‘In the Bookshop’ column, noted on 12 April 1906:

Among the shilling books specially suited for reading on the Spring Holiday, I must note ‘The Vital Spark’ which is just being published by Messrs. Blackwood. It would seem that the success of Erchie has given the booksellers confidence in anything bearing the signature of ‘Hugh Foulis’, as the orders for ‘The Vital Spark’ are much larger than for the former book. London orders are particularly large. As most Glasgow people know, the sketches, which originally appeared in the News, of the exploits of Para Handy and his crew are intensely funny, without degenerating into caricature, and it is safe to predict a very large sale for the book when it is placed before the public.

After what must have been a long wait for admirers of Para the Vital Spark sailed again on 10 February 1908, when Sunny Jim appeared as ‘A New Cook’. Over the next three years the bulk of the stories which were to feature in the second anthology, In Highland Harbours with Para Handy, S.S. Vital Spark, appeared at irregular intervals in the News.

The return of Para was welcomed in an enthusiastic letter to the editor and after a few weeks Munro’s two humorous series – Para and Erchie – were moved from the Monday ‘Looker-On’ spot to the Saturday edition with its weekend reading section. In the announcement of this change both series were, for the first time, announced as being written by Neil Munro. However, by the end of the year Para was back as an irregular feature in the ‘Looker-On’ column.

Many of the stories of this period are very closely linked to and inspired by contemporary events and it would seem that Munro increasingly waited for topical inspiration before turning out a Para story. For example, ‘To Campbeltown by Sea’ is set in a heatwave and was published in July 1908 when Scotland was suffering a remarkable spell of heat and drought; ‘Pension Farms’, originally published in December 1908, relates to the introduction of old-age pensions in that year. The collection that appeared in July 1911 was enthusiastically welcomed – the News reviewer noting ‘they sparkle with a humour that is ever fresh’.

A third collection appeared in 1923. Fourteen tales which appeared in the News after 1912 were omitted from this collection; most of these were inspired by the First World War and, although Munro used a number of war-time stories in the 1923 edition, he presumably chose to reduce the number of references to war-time events. These must have seemed a little dated just a few years after the events, although the passage of seventy years has given considerable interest and charm to these once-rejected stories. However, apart from the novelty value of these fourteen stories, and another written after Hurricane Jack of the Vital Spark appeared in 1923, many of them are tales of the highest quality.

These ‘minor pieces’, which Munro turned out as part of his regular journalistic work and which he thought of so little worth, have been his most lasting works. They were transferred into successful television series that brought the Vital Spark and her crew to an audience far beyond Munro’s Glasgow.

The omnibus edition reprinted regularly for twenty years, being replaced in Blackwood’s list by a collection of the three volumes of the Para stories in 1955, the Erchie and Jimmy Swan stories going out of print at this time. Paperback editions of the Para Handy stories have been available since 1969. Ironically, the historical novels, which Munro valued so highly and which he published under his own name, unlike the short stories issued under a pseudonym, had by the 1980s all gone out of print.

Neil Munro

My goodness! . . . and you’ll be writing things for the papers? Cot bless me! . . . and do you tell me you can be makin’ a living off that? I’m not asking you, mind, hoo mich you’ll be makin’, don’t tell me; not a cheep! not a cheep! But I’ll wudger it’s more than Maclean the munister.

Neil Munro was born in Inveraray on Loch Fyneside, in the building known as Crombie’s Land, on 3 June 1864. Generations of his family had lived and worked as farmers and shepherds at the village of Carnus, now disappeared, in Glen Aray – or so at least goes the version printed in all the standard sources.

In fact, the truth is slightly different. Munro was actually born on 3 June 1863 – exactly one year earlier than the ‘official’ date. The birth certificate shows him to have been the illegitimate son of Ann Munro, Kitchen Maid. A twin sister was still-born. There is no record of a marriage of this Ann Munro to the James Thompson Munro who was later represented as Neil Munro’s father on, among other sources, his death certificate. The 1871 census returns for Inveraray record a family living in a one-roomed dwelling at McVicar’s Land, Ark Lane, consisting of Angus McArthur Munro, aged sixty-six, formerly a crofter; his daughter, Agnes Munro, unmarried domestic servant aged thirty-eight and Neil, his grandson, aged seven. (It is noteworthy that the correct date of birth had been supplied to the census enumerator.) It would thus seem that Munro, like his hero Para Handy, was ‘. . . . brocht up wi’ an auntie . . .’

He attended a village school at Glencaldine near Inveraray and later Church Square Public School in Inveraray. When he left school, he was at the age of fourteen –

. . . insinuated, without any regard for my own desires, into a country lawyer’s office, wherefrom I withdrew myself as soon as I arrived at years of discretion and revolt. (The Brave Days)

The country lawyer’s office was in fact the office of the Sheriff Clerk of Argyll and one may speculate as to the influence which placed a poor boy with no obvious family influence in such a sought-after and prestigious post. During his five years there he countered the boredom of office routine by reading and developed his flair for writing by contributing short articles for local newspapers.

His youthful boredom was coupled with a realisation that the future for the small communities of Loch Fyneside was bleak. Years later in his The Clyde, River and Firth he wrote:

In 1750 the Duke of Argyll could raise if necessary 10,000 men able to bear arms. The bulk of them must have been found between the shores of Loch Fyne and Loch Awe; single glens of Loch Fyne could turn out over two hundred swords; now they are desolate.

In May 1881 like many ambitious young men before him, and even more since, he took the sea-road south to Glasgow and, while learning shorthand, earned his living in the cashier’s office of an ironmonger’s shop in the Trongate. Before long, however, he found a post on a small local newspaper, spending ten years there before moving on to a newspaper of some significance, the Greenock Advertiser. He next worked for the Glasgow News, where he remained until it closed, when he was offered a post with the much larger Glasgow Evening News. He soon became chief reporter as well as art, drama and literary critic. He semi-retired from journalism around 1902 to devote himself to his novels. During the war he returned to full-time work and was made editor in 1918, a position which he held until his – reluctant – retirement in 1927.

While engaged on his journalistic work Munro began writing short stories, novels and poetry. His shorter work appeared in a number of the flourishing literary periodicals of the period and a collection of stories, The Lost Pibroch, was published by Blackwood’s in 1896.

The theme of much of Munro’s fiction was the decline of the old order in the Highlands, a theme he had tackled in his 1898 novel Gillian the Dreamer. His reputation as a novelist largely rests on the historical adventure novels John Splendid, Doom Castle and The New Road. Munro became seen, particularly after the publication of The New Road in 1914, as the heir to the Robert Louis Stevenson tradition and The New Road – based on the impact of General Wade’s military road and the inevitable changes it would bring to Highland ways and the local balance of power – is certainly worthy to be considered in the same league as Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Sadly his output, particularly after his early retirement, was not large.

Two collections of essays and journalism were published after his death, The Brave Days and The Looker-On – The Brave Days being a series of autobiographical sketches he contributed to the News after his retirement, while the other collection gathered together some of the splendidly characteristic pieces from his literary journalism, some special reports and the regular ‘Looker-On’ column from earlier in the century.

After his final retirement from the News he moved in 1927 to a beautiful Regency villa in Helensburgh overlooking his beloved Firth of Clyde. He named the house ‘Cromalt’ after a stream in his native Inveraray.

On 27 December 1930 the Dumbartonshire local paper, the Lennox Herald, noted:

The death has occurred at his residence, ‘Cromalt’, of Mr Neil Munro, LL.D., the Scottish novelist and journalist. He was in his 67th year and had been in failing health for some time. Of a reticent and unassuming nature, he never sought public favour, but as long ago as 1908 he was honoured with the degree of LL.D by Glasgow University and, only two months ago, a similar compliment was paid him by Edinburgh University. He received the freedom of his native town of Inveraray in 1909.

Munro was buried at Kilmalieu, in Inveraray, and later a memorial service was held in Glasgow Cathedral, attended by his Glasgow friends, representatives of the University and the Church. The Glasgow Herald obituary observed that although in latter years he had published but little ‘he had already accomplished his life’s work – of taking up and wearing the mantle of R.L.S. . . .’ The Rev. Lauchlan MacLean Watt, an authority on the works of Stevenson, went further and described Munro as the ‘greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott, and in the matter of Celtic story and character he excelled Sir Walter because of his more deeply intimate knowledge of that elusive mystery.’ The novelist Hugh Walpole lamented the death of ‘one of Scotland’s few great novelists’.

One of his great advocates was a friend and former News colleague, the novelist George Blake, who edited and introduced the two posthumous collections The Brave Days and The Looker-On. In his introduction to the former volume Blake speaks of Munro’s reticent nature and of the contrast between his two personalities and two fields of writing – the Neil Munro of the novels and the ‘Hugh Foulis’ of the lighter writing and the journalism. There was also certainly an evident tension manifest in much of his work between the Glasgow journalist, working in a city which he knew well and loved deeply, and the Highland exile, forever homesick for the Argyllshire of his childhood.

Five years after his death a monument was erected to him on a bleak hillside in Glen Aray, facing the vanished home of his ancestors. The intiative to commemorate him was taken by An Comunn Gaidhealach. Speaking at the unveiling Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham described Munro as ‘the apostolic successor of Sir Walter Scott’. The monument is a pyramid of local stone crowned by a Celtic book-shrine, and, unlike the tombstone in Kilmalieu cemetery and all the public and published biographical sources, bears Munro’s true birth date of 1863.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Graham Hopner of West Dunbartonshire Libraries for his help with Neil Munro’s biography. Our thanks are also due to David Harvie for his contribution to this section and for other advice and encouragement, and to Jessie MacLeod for her help and advice on matters Gaelic.

The Vital Spark

1. Para Handy, Master Mariner

A short, thick-set man, with a red beard, a hard round felt hat, ridiculously out of harmony with a blue pilot jacket and trousers and a seaman’s jersey, his hands immersed deeply in those pockets our fathers (and the heroes of Rabelais) used to wear behind a front flap, he would have attracted my notice even if he had not, unaware of my presence so close behind him, been humming to himself the chorus of a song that used to be very popular on gabbarts1, but is now gone out of date, like ‘The Captain with the Whiskers Took a Sly Glance at Me’. You may have heard it thirty years ago, before the steam puffer2 came in to sweep the sailing smack from all the seas that lie between Bowling and Stornoway. It runs—

Young Munro he took a notion

For to sail across the sea,

And he left his true love weeping,

All alone on Greenock Quay

and by that sign, and by his red beard, and by a curious gesture he had, as if he were now and then going to scratch his ear and only determined not to do it when his hand was up, I knew he was one of the Macfarlanes. There were ten Macfarlanes, all men, except one, and he was a valet, but the family did their best to conceal the fact, and said he was away on the yachts, and making that much money he had not time to write a scrape home.

‘I think I ought to know you,’ I said to the vocalist with the hard hat. ‘You are a Macfarlane: either the Beekan, or Kail, or the Nipper, or Keep Dark, or Para Handy —’

‘As sure as daith,’ said he, ‘I’m chust Para Handy, and I ken your name fine, but I cannot chust mind your face.’ He had turned round on the pawl3 he sat on, without taking his hands from his pockets, and looked up at me where I stood beside him, watching a river steamer being warped into the pier.

‘My goodness!’ he said about ten minutes later, when he had wormed my whole history out of me; ‘and you’ll be writing things for the papers? Cot bless me! and do you tell me you can be makin’ a living off that? I’m not asking you, mind, hoo mich you’ll be makin’, don’t tell me; not a cheep! not a cheep! But I’ll wudger it’s more than Maclean the munister. But och! I’m not saying: it iss not my business. The munister has two hundred in the year and a coo’s gress4; he iss aye the big man up yonder, but it iss me would like to show him he wass not so big a man as yourself. Eh? But not a cheep! not a cheep! A Macfarlane would never put his nose into another man’s oar.’

‘And where have you been this long while?’ I asked, having let it sink into his mind that there was no chance today of his learning my exact income, expenditure, and how much I had in the bank.

‘Me!’ said he; ‘I am going up and down like yon fellow in the Scruptures – what wass his name? Sampson – seeking what I may devour.5 I am out of a chob. Chust that: out of a chob. You’ll not be hearin’ of anybody in your line that iss in want of a skipper?’

Skippers, I said, were in rare demand in my line of business. We hadn’t used a skipper for years.

‘Chust that! chust that! I only mentioned it in case. You are making things for newspapers, my Cot! what will they not do now for the penny? Well, that is it; I am out of a chob; chust putting bye the time. I’m not vexed for myself, so mich as for poor Dougie. Dougie wass mate, and I wass skipper. I don’t know if you kent the Fital Spark?’

The Vital Spark, I confessed, was well known to me as the most uncertain puffer that ever kept the Old New-Year6 in Upper Lochfyne.

‘That wass her!’ said Macfarlane, almost weeping. ‘There was never the bate of her, and I have sailed in her four years over twenty with my hert in my mooth for fear of her boiler. If you never saw the Fital Spark, she is aal hold, with the boiler behind, four men and a derrick, and a watter-butt and a pan loaf7 in the fo’c’sle. Oh man! she wass the beauty! She was chust sublime! She should be carryin’ nothing but gentry for passengers, or nice genteel luggage for the shooting-lodges, but there they would be spoilin’ her and rubbin’ all the pent off her with their coals, and sand, and whunstone, and oak bark, and timber, and trash like that.’

‘I understood she had one weakness at least, that her boiler was apt to prime.’

‘It’s a — lie,’ cried Macfarlane, quite furious; ‘her boiler never primed more than wance a month, and that wass not with fair play. If Dougie wass here he would tell you.

‘I wass ass prood of that boat ass the Duke of Argyll, ay, or Lord Breadalbane. If you would see me waalkin’ aboot on her dake when we wass lyin’ at the quay! There wasna the like of it in the West Hielan’s. I wass chust sublime! She had a gold bead aboot her; it’s no lie I am tellin’ you, and I would be pentin’ her oot of my own pocket every time we went to Arran for gravel. She drawed four feet forrit and nine aft, and she could go like the duvvle.’

‘I have heard it put at five knots,’ I said maliciously.

Macfarlane bounded from his seat. ‘Five knots!’ he cried. ‘Show me the man that says five knots, and I will make him swallow the hatchet. Six knots, ass sure ass my name iss Macfarlane; many a time between the Skate and Otter.8 If Dougie wass here he would tell you. But I am not braggin’ aboot her sailin’; it wass her looks. Man, she was smert, smert! Every time she wass new pented I would be puttin’ on my Sunday clothes. There wass a time yonder they would be callin’ me Two-flag Peter in Loch Fyne. It wass wance the Queen had a jubilee, and we had but the wan flag, but a Macfarlane never wass bate, and I put up the wan flag and a regatta shirt, and I’m telling you she looked chust sublime!’

‘I forget who it was once told me she was very wet,’ I cooed blandly; ‘that with a head wind the Vital Spark nearly went out altogether. Of course, people will say nasty things about these hookers. They say she was very ill to trim, too.’

Macfarlane jumped up again, grinding his teeth, and his face purple. He could hardly speak with indignation. ‘Trum!’ he shouted. ‘Did you say “trum”? You could trum her with the wan hand behind your back and you lookin’ the other way. To the duvvle with your trum! And they would be sayin’ she wass wet! If Dougie wass here he would tell you. She would not take in wan cup of watter unless it wass for synin’9 oot the dishes. She wass that dry she would not wet a postage stamp unless we slung it over the side in a pail. She wass sublime, chust sublime!

‘I am telling you there iss not many men following the sea that could sail the Fital Spark the way I could. There iss not a rock, no, nor a chuckie stone inside the Cumbrie Heid that I do not have a name for. I would ken them fine in the dark by the smell, and that iss not easy, I’m telling you. And I am not wan of your dry-land sailors. I wass wance at Londonderry with her. We went at night, and did Dougie no’ go away and forget oil, so that we had no lamps, and chust had to sail in the dark with our ears wide open. If Dougie wass here he would tell you. Now and then Dougie would be striking a match for fear of a collusion.’

‘Where did he show it?’ I asked innocently. ‘Forward or aft?’

‘Aft,’ said the mariner suspiciously. ‘What for would it be aft? Do you mean to say there could be a collusion aft? I am telling you she could do her six knots before she cracked her shaft. It wass in the bow, of course; Dougie had the matches. She wass chust sublime. A gold bead oot of my own pocket, four men and a derrick, and a watter-butt and a pan loaf in the fo’c’sle. My bonnie wee Fital Spark!’

He began to show symptoms of tears, and I hate to see an ancient mariner’s tears, so I hurriedly asked him how he had lost the command.

‘I will tell you that,’ said he. ‘It was Dougie’s fault. We had yonder a cargo of coals for Tarbert, and we got doon the length of Greenock, going fine, fine. It wass the day after the New Year, and I wass in fine trum, and Dougie said, “Wull we stand in here for orders?” and so we went into Greenock for some marmalade, and did we no’ stay three days? Dougie and me wass going about Greenock looking for signboards with Hielan’ names on them, and every signboard we could see with Campbell, or Macintyre, on it, or Morrison, Dougie would go in and ask if the man came from Kilmartin or anyway roond aboot there, and if the man said no, Dougie would say, “It’s a great peety, for I have cousins of the same name, but maybe you’ll have time to come oot for a dram?”10 Dougie was chust sublime!

‘Every day we would be getting sixpenny telegrams from the man the coals was for at Tarbert, but och! we did not think he wass in such an aawful hurry, and then he came himself to Greenock with the Grenadier11, and the only wans that wass not in the polis-office wass myself and the derrick. He bailed the laads out of the polis-office, and “Now,” he said, “you will chust sail her up as fast as you can, like smert laads, for my customers iss waiting for their coals, and I will go over and see my good-sister12 at Helensburgh, and go back to Tarbert the day efter tomorrow.” “Hoo can we be going and us with no money?” said Dougie – man, he wass sublime! So the man gave me a paper pound of money, and went away to Helensburgh, and Dougie wass coilin’ up a hawser forrit ready to start from the quay. When he wass away, Dougie said we would maybe chust be as weel to wait another tide, and I said I didna know, but what did he think, and he said, “Ach, of course!” and we went aal back into Greenock. “Let me see that pound!” said Dougie, and did I not give it to him? and then he rang the bell of the public hoose we were in, and asked for four tacks and a wee hammer. When he got the four tacks and the wee hammer he nailed the pound note on the door, and said to the man, “Chust come in with a dram every time we ring the bell till that’s done!” If Dougie wass here he would tell you. Two days efter that the owner of the Fital Spark came doon from Gleska13 and five men with him, and they went away with her to Tarbert.’

‘And so you lost the old command,’ I said, preparing to go off. ‘Well, I hope something will turn up soon.’

‘There wass some talk aboot a dram,’ said the mariner. ‘I thought you said something aboot a dram, but och! there’s no occasion!’

A week later, I am glad to say, the captain and his old crew were reinstated on the Vital Spark.

2. The Prize Canary

‘Canaries!’ said Para Handy contemptuously, ‘I have a canary yonder at home that would give you a sore heid to hear him singing. He’s chust sublime. Have I no’, Dougie?’

It was the first time the mate had ever heard of the captain as a bird-fancier, but he was a loyal friend, and at Para Handy’s wink he said promptly, ‘You have that, Peter. Wan of the finest ever stepped. Many a sore heid I had wi’t.’

‘What kind of a canary is it?’ asked the Brodick man jealously. ‘Is it a Norwich?’

Para Handy put up his hand as usual to scratch his ear, and checked the act half way. ‘No, nor a Sandwich; it’s chust a plain yellow wan,’ he said coolly. ‘I’ll wudger ye a pound it could sing the best you have blin’. It whustles even-on1, night and day, till I have to put it under a bowl o’ watter if I’m wantin’ my night’s sleep.’

The competitive passions of the Brodick man were roused. He considered that among his dozen prize canaries he had at least one that could beat anything likely to be in the possession of the captain of the Vital Spark, which was lying at Brodick when this conversation took place. He produced it – an emaciated, sickle-shaped, small-headed, bead-eyed, business-looking bird, which he called the Wee Free2. He was prepared to put up the pound for a singing contest anywhere in Arran, date hereafter to be arranged.

‘That’s all right,’ said Para Handy, ‘I’ll take you on. We’ll be doon this way for a cargo of grevel in a week, and if the money’s wi’ the man in the shippin’-box at the quay, my canary’ll lift it.’

‘But what aboot your pound?’ asked the Brodick man. ‘You must wudger a pound too.’

‘Is that the way o’t?’ said the captain. ‘I wass never up to the gemblin’, but I’ll risk the pound,’ and so the contest was arranged.

‘But you havena a canary at aal, have you?’ said Dougie, later in the day, as the Vital Spark was puffing on her deliberate way to Glasgow.

‘Me?’ said Para Handy, ‘I would as soon think of keepin’ a hoolet.3 But och, there’s plenty in Gleska if you have the money. From the needle to the anchor. Forbye, I ken a gentleman that breeds canaries; he’s a riveter, and if I wass gettin’ him in good trum he would maybe give me a lend o’ wan. If no’, we’ll take a dander4 up to the Bird Market, and pick up a smert wan that’ll put the hems5 on Sandy Kerr’s Wee Free. No man wi’ any releegion aboot him would caal his canary a Wee Free.’

The captain and the mate of the Vital Spark left their noble ship at the wharf that evening – it was a Saturday – and went in quest of the gentleman who bred canaries. He was discovered in the midst of an altercation with his wife which involved the total destruction of all the dishes on the kitchen-dresser, and, with a shrewdness and consideration that were never absent in the captain, he apologised for the untimely intrusion and prepared to go away. ‘I see you’re busy,’ he said, looking in on a floor covered with the debris of the delf6 which this ardent lover of bird life was smashing in order to impress his wife with the fact that he was really annoyed about something – ‘I see you’re busy. Fine, man, fine! A wife need never weary in this hoose – it’s that cheery. Dougie and me wass chust wantin’ a wee lend of a canary for a day or two, but och, it doesna matter, seein’ ye’re so throng; we’ll chust try the shops.’

It was indicative of the fine kindly humanity of the riveter who loved canaries that this one unhesitatingly stopped his labours, having disposed of the last plate, and said, ‘I couldna dae’t, chaps; I wadna trust a canary oot o’ the hoose; there’s nae sayin’ the ill-usage it micht get. It would break my he’rt to ha’e onything gang wrang wi’ ony o’ my birds.’

‘Chust that, Wull, chust that!’ said Para Handy agreeably. ‘Your feelings does you credit. I would be awful vexed if you broke your he’rt; it’ll soon be the only hale thing left in the hoose. If I wass you, and had such a spite at the delf, I would use dunnymite,’ and Dougie and he departed.

‘That’s the sort of thing that keeps me from gettin’ merrit,’ the captain, with a sigh, confided to his mate, when they got down the stair. ‘Look at the money it costs for dishes every Setturday night.’

‘Them riveters iss awfu’ chaps for sport,’ said Dougie irrelevantly.

‘There’s nothing for’t now but the Bird Market,’ said the captain, leading the way east along Argyle Street. They had no clear idea where that institution was, but at the corner of Jamaica Street7 consulted several Celtic compatriots, who put them on the right track. Having reached the Bird Market8, the captain explained his wants to a party who had ‘Guaranteed A1 Songsters’ to sell at two shillings. This person was particularly enthusiastic about one bird which in the meantime was as silent as ‘the harp that once through Tara’s halls’. He gave them his solemn assurance it was a genuine prize roller canary; that when it started whistling, as it generally did at breakfast time, it sang till the gas was lit, with not even a pause for refreshment. For that reason it was an economical canary to keep; it practically cost nothing for seed for this canary. If it was a songster suitable for use on a ship that was wanted, he went on, with a rapid assumption that his customers were of a maritime profession, this bird was peculiarly adapted for the post. It was a genuine imported bird, and had already made a sea voyage. To sell a bird of such exquisite parts for two shillings was sheer commercial suicide; he admitted it, but he was anxious that it should have a good home.