good temper of every one on board. The cook
sulked a little, and used to go about looking at
the sky, and muttering; but, as his moodiness
only showed itself in getting out on the
bowsprit in royal solitude and scouring a favourite
stewpan, he offended no one. The captain was
in a dancing state of delight, and swore, if the
old vessel ever was broken up in his lifetime,
he would buy her figure-head to put it in his
garden at Lower Easton. I used to go on
shore to shoot parrots, or get a cut at a
hippopotamus; and, what with that and the flute,
and learning all the sail-makers' knots and my
trigonometry, I was pretty well occupied.

"How well I remember that river, turning
the sea to a slab soup colour at its mouth,
and narrowing to mangrove creeks and jungly
ditches, as it mudded the bright, blue, crisp
water that I had learned to love as so safe and
sure a sign of the deep sea! 'Twas up this fatal
river—not green and transparent yellow, but
brown and sewer-like—that we lay some way from
the bar, where there was always a trembling line
of froth; near the ruins of an old Portuguese
fort, which some husky dwarf palms, dry and
bloodless, crowed over, and some three miles
from the negro village where we got our hard
wood cutters from. The heat was that of a
furnace door, when you throw it open suddenly and
shut your eyes as the great tongues of fire lick
out savagely and blindingly. The low morass
banks were without a hut, and covered with
thick jungle of palm and mangrove. No sound
came but the mournful shriek or bellow of some
unknown amphibious bird or beast. The wild
waves on the banks had a way of tossing and
heaving, apparently without a cause; but—except
for four hours in the evening, when the negro
king came to us for rum, or the workmen
brought us wood—we saw no living creature; so
that we got dull and satiated with incessant
sleep, and eager as children for a holiday to get
home.

"One day the negro king, a magnificent
potentate, with a fish-strainer for a breastplate
and a triple tiara of old hat, came in state with
a retinue of greasy rascals with spears to warn
us of the hot season that would begin in a few
days. The captain winked at us, and said that
if it rained brimstone he was not going to trip
anchor till he had got all his hard wood on board.
He knew all their tricks. They had got all the
presents out of us, and now they wanted to save
their trouble with the wood, and get us off.
Words ensued between the king and the
captain, ending with the captain kicking the
king into his boat, and one of our men getting
wounded in the hip with a spear—rather a
troublesome thing; for the wound wanted probing,
and, when we went to the doctor he only
raved and wallowed about, and said 'we were
all doomed.' He kept shouting throughout the
night, 'All doomed!'

"The next day no negro came near us, and
we got anxious; but the captain said the voyage
had been a good one; there was no hurry, and
he should wait if it was three weeks, hot
season, or no hot season, for he wasn't going to
be cheated by a set of niggers. That was
Tuesday. Wednesday, when I got up an hour
before daylight for my watch, I found a hot
steaming fog choking up the river, that made
you cough involuntarily. I felt as sick as
I was in my first gale of wind; and, to my
surprise, when I looked round, I saw the cook
holding his nose, and pulling a longer face than
usual.

"'What churchyard are you last from?' I
said.

"Said he, ' I think I could tell you better
what churchyard I am going to—and some more
of us.'

"Upon this we fell to words, and I declared
I would report him to the captain; for, in those
young days, like all youngsters, I stood very
much on my dignity; having nothing else to stand
upon, in fact.

"'Pipe away,' says he; 'but he has just
turned in.'

"'Not well?' said I.

"'Not well,' echoed the sulky fellow, looking
at me from under his eyes with, I thought, more
pity than vexation.

"'We are all doomed!' roared the doctor
from his hammock.

"'And that's about it,' said the cook,
grumbling off to get on the bowsprit to scour
his stewpan.

"Every day came that mist, passing into a
warm dropping dew as the sun broke out like a
swift, red-hot twenty-four pounder through the
winks of fading stars. Then the long, long,
burning, dull day, and then night, and the low
creeping death-mist and its warm strangling
vapour over again. The doctor got worse and
worse, and, when I went one morning to see if
I could get from him some advice about the
captain's fever, I found him, with clenched
teeth, trying still feebly to repeat the words,
'All—doomed.' A short interval of feeble
sanity came on, and he managed to raise
himself in bed, and point to a certain drawer in
his medicine chest. I touched the two first
knobs, and he shook his head. I touched the
third, and he smiled, gasped out something, fell
back, and died.

"When I opened the drawer I found a paper
labelled Peruvian Bark; a great antidote for
such fevers as were now smouldering through
the ship; but, unluckily, the rats and
cockroaches had got at it, and not more than two
table-spoonfuls were left. I, whom they all
looked up to because I had some book learning,
divided this amongst the men, for the captain
refused to take any, and said I wanted to poison
him and to sell the ship to the nigger king. His
mind wandered through weakness, and he seldom
came on deck; sleeping much, and I am afraid
drinking—no one daring to stop him.

"There was no doubt we had the fever. Five
were down. The cook first fell ill; then the
boatswain, who died of sheer fright. Still
we dared not turn the ship homeward while the
loading was unfinished. The work went on very