one day they would settle their little differences with their own muscular arms, and without troubling any outside tribunal. But the captain decided the dispute for them in a very practical and good-humoured fashion. He called them both on deck, made a ring, and ordered them both to strip and see which was really the better man. At the same time, he quietly told the mate to put on the hose and have the force pumps in readiness. When the combatants made their appearance inside the ring, the captain gave the signal to the mate, the hose was immediately brought into operation, and the would-be fighters received so thorough a drenching that nothing more was heard of such personal quarrels for the remainder of the voyage. Every Friday the passengers were supplied with fish and pea soup. It happened on one day that a piece of pork was found in the soup, and the alarming discovery caused considerable commotion. Some of the immigrants lost all faith in the Friday soup after that little accident, and could not be prevailed upon to taste it again. Indeed, one old woman, in the height of her indignation, went so far as to charge the captain with being a "souper" in disguise, that being the repulsive epithet applied by the people to those aggressive Protestant zealots who, with most unchristian indecency, did their best during the famine years, but with very little success, to pervert and demoralise the starving Irish Catholics by offering them basins of soup on Fridays. As a rule, it took some time to reconcile the Irish immigrants to the ship biscuits and the pea soup. They sometimes imagined that the biscuits were t the cause of their sea-sickness, and they could not bear the; sight of them. On one of the ships the immigrants rebelled against the pea soup, waited on the captain, and remonstrated with him for offering them such "dirty-looking stuff," and,
