got souls, there’s hope for everything—down to a scorpion. My own wife, as I’ve left out in Tobago with my family—well, I wouldn’t go for to call her black; an’ for that matter I knocked a white man off the wharf to Scarborough in Tobago, who did say so; but you folks to home—I dare swear you’d think her was a thought nigger-like, owing to a touch of the tar-brush, as we call it, long ways back in her family history. But as good a woman—wife an’ mother—as ever feared God an’ washed linen. A laundress, neighbours—lower than me by her birth, so my master said; then I laughed in his face, an’ told un I was a workhouse boy as couldn’t name no father but God A’mighty. A nice little bungy, round-about woman, wi’ butivul black eyes, an’ so straight in her vartue as a princess. Never a man had no better wife, an’ her’d have come to see old Dartymoor along with me but for my family, as be large an’ all sizes. “Well, to Tobago it was that, lending a hand to help lade a Royal Mail Steam Packet as comed in—just to make a shilling or two while we was idle, I got struck down. Loading wi’ cocoanuts an’ turtle her was; an’ ’twould make you die o’ laughin’, souls, to have seen them reptiles hoisted aboard by their flippers. No laughing matter for them though, poor twoads, because, once they’m catched by moonlight ’pon the sandy beaches there, ’tis a very poor come-along-of-it for ’em. Not a bit more food do they have, but just be shipped off home in turtle-troughs an’ make the best weather they can. Us had a stormy journey back last fortnight, an’ I knowed by the turtle-soup o’ nights that the creatures were dying rapid an’ somebody had made a bad bargain. But if you gets the varmints home alive, they be worth a Jew’s eye. “Suddenly, helping in a shore barge, I went down as if somebody had fetched me a clout ’pon top the head; an’, when I came to, there was doctor from shore an’ the dowl to pay. ’Twas days afore I could get about, an’ my ship couldn’t wait, an’ no work for me nowhere ’cept odd jobs. Then they told me I was a D.B.S., which means a Distressed British Seaman, an’ I found as I’d have to wait for next steamer that comed to ship me off. But I weren’t very down-daunted ’bout it, for, since I’d seen the size of the earth, I’d growed bigger in the mind a bit, an’ I ate my food an’ smoked my pipe an’ thanked God that I was alive to try again.