One old chap used to come to work and bring his gang with him to go on with the lading, and one day when he came some of our fellows began to chaff him, for he'd got his head shaved, and what for do you think, but because he was in mourning, and had put away his wife? Not as that seemed to me anything to go in mourning for, since some of our chaps would have been a wonderful deal better without their wives as they left behind in Liverpool. But this chap had divorced his wife because she had let the child die, so he said, and there was the poor woman in double trouble. "S'pose she couldn't help the little 'un going," says Bob to him. "Ah! yes, Sahib," says this old chap, Jamsy Jam, as he called himself, "oh yes, Sahib, she let child die--mosh trouble." But I'm blest if I don't think it was him wanted to get rid of his wife, and so made this an excuse. Bob Davis and me one day stood looking over the side o' the ship, same as we often did, and he says to me, he says:-- "Last time as I was here, we was lying a hundred yards further up the stream, and one day when I was in the bows, I could see something hitched on to the chain as moored us to the buoy, and if it wasn't one of them poor fellows as had come down with the stream from perhaps hundreds of miles up the country, and there wasn't one of our chaps as would get him off, so it came to my share to do it, and I undertook it out of a bit of bounce because the others wouldn't, for I felt proper scared and frightened over it. They often gets hitched in the mooring chains of ships, and p'raps we shall come in for one before we goes." About an hour after I goes and looks down at the chain, when if I didn't turn all shivering, for there was something dusky hitched on sure enough, and I ran and called Bob Davis up to have a look, and see if it wasn't what he'd been a talking about. "So it is," he says; and he went and told the captain and mate, and they came and had a look, when the dinghy was ordered down, and Bob and me in her, to set the body free. Now I didn't like the job a bit, and I pulled a long face at Bob, just same time as he was pulling a long face at me; but our captain was a man who would stand no nonsense, so we were soon down in the boat, and I put her along the side, while Bob got hold of the boat-hook, and reached out at the body. But it warn't a body of a poor black at all, but a god as was dressed up, and had been sent sailing down from one of their grand feasts somewhere up the river, one of those set-outs where there's so much dancing and beating of tom-toms and singing in their benighted, un-Christian-like, dreary fashion, all Ea-la-ba-sha-la-ma-ca-la-fa; for it sounds like nothing else to a sailor chap as don't understand Hindostanee.