Rencontre with Slave-Traders—On Board again—A Start, a Misfortune, a Ghost Story, a Mistake, and an Invitation to Dinner.  
On the evening of the second day after the capture of Jacko, as the canoe was descending the river and drawing near to the sea-coast, much to the delight of everyone—for the heat of the interior had begun to grow unbearable—a ship’s boat was observed moored to the wharf near the slave-station which they had passed on the way up. At first it was supposed to be one of the boats of the Red Eric, but on a nearer approach this proved to be an erroneous opinion.
 
“Wot can it be a-doin’ of here?” inquired Tim Rokens, in an abstracted tone of voice, as if he put the question to himself, and therefore did not expect an answer.
 
“No doubt it’s a slaver’s boat,” replied the trader; “they often come up here for cargoes of niggers.”
 
“Och! the blackguards!” exclaimed Phil Briant, all his blood rising at the mere mention of the horrible traffic; “couldn’t we land, capting, and give them a lickin’? I’ll engage meself to put six at laste o’ the spalpeens on their beam-ends.”
 
“No, Phil, we shan’t land for that purpose; but we’ll land for some gunpowder an’ a barrel or two of plantains; so give way, lads.”
 
In another moment the bow of the canoe slid upon the mud-bank of the river close to the slaver’s boat, which was watched by a couple of the most villainous-looking men that ever took part in that disgraceful traffic. They were evidently Portuguese sailors, and the scowl of their bronzed faces, when they saw the canoe approach the landing-place, showed that they had no desire to enter into amicable converse with the strangers.
 
At this moment the attention of the travellers was drawn to a gang of slaves who approached the wharf, chained together by the neck, and guarded by the crew of the Portuguese boat. Ailie looked on with a feeling of dread that induced her to cling to her father’s hand, while the men stood with folded arms, compressed lips, and knitted brows.
 
On the voyage up they had landed at this station, and had seen the slaves in their places of confinement. The poor creatures were apparently happy at that time, and seemed totally indifferent to their sad fate; but their aspect was very different now. They were being hurried away, they knew not whither, by strangers whom they had been taught to believe were monsters of cruelty besides being cannibals, and who had purchased them for the purpose of killing them and eating their bodies. The wild, terrified looks of the men, and the subdued looks and trembling gait of the women showed that they expected no mercy at the hands of their captors.
 
They hung back a little as they drew near to the boat, whereupon one of their conductors, who seemed to be in command of the party, uttered a fierce exclamation in Portuguese, and struck several of the men and women indiscriminately severe blows with his fists. In a few minutes they were all placed in the boat, and the crew had partly embarked, when Phil Briant, unable to restrain himself, muttered between his teeth to the Portuguese commander as he passed—
 
“Ye imp o’ darkness, av I only had ye in the ring for tshwo minits—jist tshwo—ah thin, wouldn’t I polish ye off.”
 
“Fat you say, sare?” cried the man, turning fiercely towards Briant, and swearing at him in bad English.
 
“Say, is it? Oh, then there’s a translation for ye, that’s understood in all lingos.”
 
Phil shook his clenched fist as close as possible to the nose of the Portuguese commander without actually coming into contact with that hooked and prominent organ.
 
The man started back and drew his knife, at the same time calling to several of his men, who advanced with their drawn knives.
 
“Ho!” cried Briant, and a jovial smile overspread his rough countenance as he sprang to a clear spot of ground and rolled up both sleeves of his shirt to the shoulders, thereby displaying a pair of arms that might, at a rapid glance, have been mistaken for a pair of legs—“that’s yer game, is it? won’t I stave in yer planks! won’t I shiver yer timbers, and knock out yer daylights, bless yer purty faces! I didn’t think ye had it in ye; come on darlints—toothpicks and all—as many as ye like; the more the better—wan at a time, or all at wance, it don’t matter, not the laste, be no manes!”
 
While Briant gave utterance to these liberal invitations, he performed a species of revolving dance, and flourished his enormous fists in so ludicrous a manner, that despite the serious nature of the fray the two parties were likely to be speedily engaged in, his comrades could not restrain their laughter.
 
“Go it, Pat!” cried one.
 
“True blue!” shouted another.
 
“Silence!” cried Captain Dunning, in a voice that enforced obedience. “Get into the canoe, Briant.”
 
“Och! capting,” exclaimed the wrathful Irishman, reproachfully, “sure ye wouldn’t spile the fun?”
 
“Go to the canoe, sir.”
 
“Ah! capting dear, jist wan round!”
 
“Go to the canoe, I say.”
 
“I’ll do it all in four minits an’ wan quarter, av ye’ll only shut yer eyes,” pleaded Phil.
 
“Obey orders, will you?” cried the captain, in a voice there was no mistaking.
 
Briant indignantly thrust his fists into his breeches pockets, and rolled slowly down towards the canoe, as—to use one of his own favourite expressions—sulky as a bear with a broken head.
 
Meanwhile the captain stepped up to the Portuguese sailors and told them to mind their own business, and let honest men alone; adding, that if they did not take his advice, he would first give them a licking and then pitch them all into the river.
 
This last remark caused Briant to prick up his ears and withdraw his fists from their inglorious retirement, in the fond hope that there might still be work for them to do; but on observing that the Portuguese, acting on the principle that discretion is the better part of valour, had taken the advice and were returning to their own boat, he relapsed into the sulks, and seated himself doggedly in his place in the canoe.
 
During all this little scene, which was enacted much more rapidly than it had been described, master Jacko, having escaped from the canoe, had been seated near the edge of the wharf, looking on, apparently, with deep interest. Just as the Portuguese turned away to embark in their boat, Ailie’s eye alighted on her pet; at the same moment the foot of the Portuguese commander alighted on her pet’s tail. Now the tails of all animals seem to be peculiarly sensitive. Jacko’s certainly was so, for he instantly uttered a shriek of agony, which was as quickly responded to by its adopted mother in a scream of alarm as she sprang forward to the rescue. When one unintentionally treads on the tail of any animal and thereby evokes a yell, he is apt to start and trip—in nine cases out of ten he does trip. The Portuguese commander tripped upon this occasion. In staggering out of the monkey’s way he well-nigh tumbled over Ailie, and in seeking to avoid her, he tumbled over the edge of the wharf into the river.
 
The difference between the appearance of this redoubtable slave-buying hero before and after his involuntary immersion was so remarkable and great that his most intimate friend would have failed to recognise him. He went down into the slimy liquid an ill-favoured Portuguese, clad in white duck; he came up a worse-favoured monstrosity, clothed in mud! Even his own rascally comrades grinned at him for a moment, but their grins changed into a scowl of anger when they heard the peals of laughter that burst from the throats of their enemies. As for Briant, he absolutely hugged himself with delight.
 
“Och! ye’ve got it, ye have,” he exclaimed, at intervals. “Happy day! who’d ha’ thought it? to see him tumbled in the mud after all by purty little Ailie and Jacko. Come here to me Jacko, owld coon. Oh, ye swate cratur!”
 
Briant seized the monkey, and squeezed it to his breast, and kissed it—yes, he actually kissed its nose in the height of his glee, and continued to utter incoherent exclamations, and to perpetrate incongruous absurdities, until long after they had descended the river and left the muddy Portuguese and his comrades far behind them.
 
Towards evening the party were once more safe and sound on board the Red Eric, where they found everything repaired, and the ship in a fit state to proceed to sea immediately.
 
His Majesty King Bumble was introduced to the steward, then to the cook, and then to the caboose. Master Jacko was introduced to the ship’s crew and to his quarters, which consisted of a small box filled with straw, and was lashed near the foot of the mizzen-mast. These introductions having been made, the men who had accompanied their commander on his late excursion into the interior, went forward and regaled their messmates for hours with anecdotes of their travels in the wilds of Africa.
 
It is well-known, and generally acknowledged, that all sublunary things, pleasant as well as unpleasant, must come to an end. In the course of two days more the sojourn of the crew of the Red Eric on the coast of Africa came to a termination. Having taken in supplies of fresh provisions, the anchor was weighed, and the ship stood out to sea with the first of the ebb tide. It was near sunset when the sails were hoisted and filled by a gentle land breeze, and the captain had just promised Ailie that he would show her blue water again by breakfast-time next morning, when a slight tremor passed through the vessel’s hull, causing the captain to shout, with a degree of vigour that startled everyone on board, “All hands ahoy! lower away the boats, Mr Millons, we’re hard and fast aground on a mud-bank!”
 
The boats were lowered away with all speed, and the sails dewed up instantly, but the Red Eric remained as immovable as the bank on which she had run aground; there was, therefore, no recourse but to wait patiently for the rising tide to float her off again. Fortunately the bank was soft and the wind light, else it might have gone ill with the good ship.
 
There is scarcely any conceivable condition so favourable to quiet confidential conversation and story-telling as the one in which the men of the whale-ship now found themselves. The night was calm and dark, but beautiful, for a host of stars sparkled in the sable sky, and twinkled up from the depths of the dark ocean. The land breeze had fallen, and there was scarcely any sound to break the surrounding stillness except the lipping water as it kissed the black hull of the ship. A dim, scarce perceptible light rendered every object on board mysterious and unaccountably large.
 
“Wot a night for a ghost story,” observed Jim Scroggles, who stood with a group of the men, who were seated on and around the windlass.
 
“I don’t b’lieve in ghosts,” said Dick Barnes stoutly, in a tone of voice that rendered the veracity of his assertion, to say the least of it, doubtful.
 
“Nother do I,” remarked Nikel Sling, who had just concluded his culinary operations for the day, and sought to employ his brief interval of relaxation in social intercourse with his fellows. Being engaged in ministering to the animal wants of his comrades all day, he felt himself entitled to enjoy a little of the “feast of reason and the flow of soul” at night:
 
“No more duv I,” added Phil Briant firmly, at the same time hitting his thigh a slap with his open hand that caused all round him to start.
 
“You don’t, don’t you?” said Tim Rokens, addressing the company generally, and looking round gravely, while he pushed the glowing tobacco into his pipe with the point of a marline-spike.
 
To this there was a chorus of “Noes,” but a close observer would have noticed that nearly the whole conversation was carried on in low tones, and that many a glance was cast behind, as if these bold sceptics more than half expected all the ghosts that did happen to exist to seize them then and there and carry them off as a punishment for their unbelief.
 
Tim Rokens drew a few whiffs of his pipe, and looked round gravely before he again spoke; then he put the following momentous question, with the air of a man who knew he could overturn his adversary whatever his reply should be—
 
“An’ why don’t ye b’lieve in ’em?”
 
We cannot say positively that Tim Rokens put the question to Jim Scroggles, but it is certain that Jim Scroggles accepted the question as addressed to him, and answered in reply—
 
“’Cause why? I never seed a ghost, an’ nobody never seed a ghost, an’ I don’t b’lieve in what I can’t see.”
 
Jim said this as if he thought the position incontestable. Tim regarded him with a prolonged stare, but for some time said nothing. At last he emitted several strong puffs of smoke, and said—
 
“Young man, did you ever see your own mind?”
 
“No, in course not.”
 
“Did anybody else ever see it?”
 
“Cer’nly not.”
 
“Then of course you don’t believe in it!” added Rokens, while a slight smile curled his upper lip.
 
The men chuckled a good deal at Jim’s confusion, while he in vain attempted to explain that the two ideas were not parallel by any means. At this juncture, Phil Briant came to the rescue.
 
“Ah now, git out,” said he. “I agree with Jim intirely; an’ Tim Rokens isn’t quite so cliver as he thinks. Now look here, lads, here’s how it stands, ’xactly. Jim says he never seed his own mind—very good; and he says as how nobody else niver seed it nother; well, and wot then? Don’t you observe it’s ’cause he han’t got none at all to see? He han’t got even the ghost of one, so how could ye expect anybody to see it?”
 
“Oh, hold yer noise, Paddy,” exclaimed Dick Barnes, “an’ let’s have a ghost story from Tim Rokens. He b’lieves in ghosts, anyhow, an’ could give us a yarn about ’em, I knows, if he likes. Come along now, Tim, like a good fellow.”
 
“Ay, that’s it,” cried Briant; “give us a stiff ’un now. Don’t be afeard to skear us, old boy.”
 
“Oh, I can give ye a yarn about ghosts, cer’nly,” said Tim Rokens, looking into the bowl of his pipe in order to make sure that it was sufficiently charged to last out the story. “I’ll tell ye of a ghost I once seed and knocked down.”
 
“Knocked down!” cried Nikel Sling in surprise; “why, I allers thought as how ghosts was spirits, an’ couldn’t be knocked down or cotched neither.”
 
“Not at all,” replied Rokens; “ghosts is made of all sorts o’ things—brass, and iron, and linen, and buntin’, and timber; it wos a brass ghost the feller that I’m goin’ to tell ye about—”
 
“I say, Sling,” interrupted Briant, “av ghosts wos spirits, as you thought they wos, would they be allowed into the State of Maine?”
 
“Oh, Phil, shut up, do! Now then, Tim, fire away.”
 
“Well, then,” began Rokens, with great deliberation, “it was on a Vednesday night as it happened. I had bin out at supper with a friend that night, and we’d had a glass or two o’ grog; for ye see, lads, it was some years ago, afore I tuk to temp’rance. I had a long way to go over a great dark moor afore I could git to the place where I lodged, so I clapped on all sail to git over the moor, seein’ the moon would go down soon; but it wouldn’t do: the moon set when I wos in the very middle of the moor, and as the road wasn’t over good, I wos in a state o’ confumble lest I should lose it altogether. I looks round in all directions, but I couldn’t see nothin’—cause why? there wasn’t nothin’ to be seen. It was ’orrid dark, I can tell ye. Jist one or two stars a-shinin’, like half-a-dozen farden dips in a great church; they only made darkness wisible. I began to feel all over a cur’ous sort o’ peculiar unaccountableness, which it ain’t easy to explain, but is most oncommon disagreeable to feel. It wos very still, too—desperate still. The beatin’ o’ my own heart sounded quite loud, and I heer’d the tickin’ o’ my watch goin’ like the click of a church clock. Oh, it was awful!”
 
At this point in the story the men crept closer together, and listened with intense earnestness.
 
“Suddently,” continued Rokens—“for things in sich circumstances always comes suddently—suddently I seed somethin’ black jump up right ahead o’ me.”
 
Here Rokens paused.
 
“Wot was it?” inquired Gurney, in a solemn whisper.
 
“It was,” resumed Rokens slowly, “the stump of a old tree.”
 
“Oh, I thought it had been the ghost,” said Gurney, somewhat relieved, for that fat little Jack-tar fully believed in apparitions, and always listened to a ghost story in fear and trembling.
 
“No it wasn’t the ghost; it was the stump of a tree. Well, I set sail again, an’ presently I sees a great white thing risin’ up ahead o’ me.”
 
“Hah! that was it,” whispered Gurney.
 
“No, that wasn’t it,” retorted Rokens; “that was a hinn, a white-painted hinn, as stood by the roadside, and right glad wos I to see it, I can tell ye, shipmates, for I wos gittin’ tired as well as frightened. I soon roused the landlord by kickin’ at the door till it nearly comed off its hinges; and arter gettin’ another glass o’ grog, I axed the landlord to show me my bunk, as I wanted to turn in.
 
“It was a queer old house that hinn wos. A great ramblin’ place, with no end o’ staircases and passages. A dreadful gloomy sort o’ place. No one lived in it except the landlord, a dark-faced surly fellow as one would like to kick out of his own door, and his wife, who wos little better than his-self. They also had a hostler, but he slept with the cattle in a hout-house.
 
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