He had, as I guessed, first swallowed the raw caulker from the rum decanter, and then sent down the lemonade to take care of it. "Now, that rum is very strong--stop, let me qualify it a bit with some more beverage--how thirsty I am, to be sure--murder!--confound that wide-necked decanter." Here I could hear the liquid splash all over him. "There--so much for having a beautiful small mouth--why, Rory Macgregor, with that hole in his face from ear to ear, would have drunk you the whole bottle without spilling a drop, and here am I, suffocated and drowned entirely, and as wet as if I had been dragged through the Bog of Allan--Murphy, you scoundrel?" Anon, two negro servants, stretching and yawning, each with a candle in his hand, made their appearance, one in his shirt, with his livery coat hanging over his head, the cape projecting forward, and a sleeve hanging down on each side; the other had his coat on certainly, but stern foremost, and not another rag of any kind or description whatever, saving and excepting his Kilmarnock nightcap. By the illumination which those ebony candlesticks furnished, I now could see about me. The room we were in was about twenty feet square, panelled, ceiled, and floored--it looked like a large box--with unpainted, but highly-polished hard-wood, of the colour of very old mahogany--handsomer than any oak panelling I had ever seen. There was a folding door that communicated with the front piazza, out of which we had scrambled---another, that opened into a kind of back dining-hall, or large porch, and two on each hand, which opened into bedrooms. A sideboard was placed by the wall to the right, between the two bedroom doors, at which stood a tall and very handsome elderly gentleman, who, if I had not instantly known to be my uncle, from his likeness to my poor mother, I might, after the adventures of the day, and the oddities of _messieurs_ my friends--_the_ Twig of the Dream, and the Flamingo of Peaweep, Snipe, and Flamingo--have suspected some quiz or practical joke in the matter. The gentleman, evidently not broad awake yet, was dressed in light-coloured kerseymere small-clothes, top-boots, white vest, and blue coat--he was very bald, with the exception of two tufts of jet-black hair behind his ears, blending into very bushy whiskers. His forehead was round and beetling--you would have said he was somewhat bullet-headed; had the obduracy of the feature not been redeemed by his eyebrows, which were thick, well arched, and, like his hair and whiskers, jet-black--and also by his genuine Irish sparklers, dark, flashing, and frolicsome. His complexion was of the clearest I had seen in Jamaica--I could never have guessed that he had been above a few weeks from the "First gem of the Sea,"--and his features generally large and well formed. There was a playful opening of the lips every now and then, disclosing nice ivory teeth, and evincing, like his eyes, the native humour of his country.