In the broad wooden balcony that projected from the low first-floor of Plugger’s and in part overhung this delectable garden, were some six or seven men in their shirt sleeves mostly, for coolness’ sake, but otherwise not ill clad. Through the open bow-windows of the long room of which the balcony was an appendage, glimpses might be caught of some ten or twelve other customers, very similar in garb and bearing to those outside. It was early as yet, and breakfast—as betokened by the empty cups, empty bottles, and confusion of knives and forks and dirty plates—was already over. Some of the company were smoking a solemn morning pipe of the yard-long ‘churchwarden’ variety, affected by sea-going persons when on shore; two seated at a round-table were engaged in a game at cards; and one copper-visaged and gray-haired captain, with a glass of steaming rum-and-water at his elbow, sat on the flat top of the wooden balustrade itself, and alternately swept the waters with the aid of a gleaming brass-bound telescope, or glanced critically at the cards and the players. In all this there was nothing to distinguish Plugger’s from many another long-shore boarding-house, wherein mates and skippers take their spell of rest, as it were, between the hardships of the last voyage and those of the next; and those who have seen much of men of this class are aware how much of sterling worth is apt to underlie the harmless peculiarities traditional to the calling. But a physiognomist who should have, himself unseen, accompanied some Asmodeus bent on taking a bird’s-eye view of the company, could scarcely have failed to draw his own deductions from the countenances thus beheld. There were faces there in plenty which would have seemed in keeping with their surroundings had they been seen above the bulwarks of a long, black-hulled schooner, rakish as to her masts, and clean and sharp as to her run and cut-water, beating to windward off the Isle of Pines, or within sight of the mountain mass of Cuba. There were others, newly shaven, that would have harmonised well with a shaggy beard and tattered cabbage-palm hat, surmounting the red shirt and pistol-studded belt of the Australian bushranger. And again, others which might be conceived to have been tanned to their mahogany hue by the reflection of the sun from the tawny surface of some African river, where, behind the mangrove swamp, might be seen the cane-thatched top of the barracoon, where the cargo of ‘live ebony’ lay shackled. A very dangerous set of scamps, unless their looks belied them, were the bulk of Plugger’s patrons, and the more dangerous perhaps because they were not reckless—because they knew how to abstain from the overdose of liquor that sets the brain afloat and loosens the tongue.