“I came through it, Mr. Onslow, without so much as a finger-nail broken. So did the donkeyman. He came up here and asked if I wanted him when the blow began, and when I told him ‘No’ he went to his own room and turned in and slept till it was over. But the niggers didn’t. When the steamer began to list they got scared; thought she’d turn bilge uppermost, I suppose; and bolted down to their fishbox of a sloop which lay alongside. Of course, when the shores slipped their moorings and bore down on her, the sloop had to give; and she and the niggers are buried somewhere yonder to starboard, but where I don’t know. I’ve looked, but there isn’t so much as a spar, there isn’t so much as a whiff of circus to put a label on the spot. I’ve had mighty little to do latterly, and I might have struck up some sort of a sign-board to ’em, niggers though they were, if I could have fixed the place to an acre; but when a grave-head gets bigger than that you may be writing ‘here lyeth’ in more senses than one. So I left them quiet. Of course, with the steamer high and dry up-country, and the river two miles away through the thick woods, it wasn’t much good our messing with paint-pots and changing name-plates. We’d built a new fore-hatch and shipped it, and greased up the engines; and, as that seemed to me all that was necessary, I’ve given my shipmate holiday ever since. There’s the making of a sportsman in our donkeyman, Mr. Onslow. There isn’t a thing that crawls or flies or swims in this section of Florida that blessed Irishman hasn’t blown off my old gas-pipe at or tried to catch with a worm on a cod-hook. He wasn’t keen at first; said he’d been brought up in a works; but when I told him everything he took was poached, by James, sir, you might think he was Prince of Wales, the way he sticks at it.” “Blood will out!” said Onslow, with a laugh, and he marveled at the extraordinary toughness of the donkeyman. At all times there is much sulphur in the water of these Floridan swamps; but since the cyclone the sulphurous emanations had been stirred and set free, till the presence of them was almost unendurable. The waters were black to look upon, yellow to look through: and in the air was a never-failing, never-varying hint at the odor of ancient eggs. It even stole into the chart-house, and mingled with the scent of the magnolia blossoms.