"I mean he mos hab been sleep in de moonlight on deck, widout no cover at all, massa." And so we found he had, sure enough, and the consequence was, a swelled face, very much like the moon herself in a fog, by the way, as if she had left her impress on the poor fellow's mug; "her moonstruck child;" but I have no time for poetry. It looked more like erysipelas than any thing else, and two days elapsed before the swelling subsided; during the whole of which the poor fellow appeared to me--but it might have been fancy--more excited and out of the way than I had seen him since the prison scene at Havanna. Can it be possible that the planet really does exercise such influences as we read of, thought I? At any rate, I now for the first time knew the literal correctness of the beautiful Psalm--"The sun shall not smite thee by day, _nor the moon by night_." We were now a week at sea; the morning had been extremely squally, but towards noon the breeze became steadier, and we again made more sail, after which Lennox, the master of the schooner, and I, went to dinner. This skipper, by the way, was a rather remarkable personage,--_first_, he rejoiced in the euphoneous, but somewhat out of the way, appellation of Tobias Tooraloo; _secondly_, his face was not a tragic volume, but a leaf out of a farce. It was for all the world like the monkey face of a cocoa-nut; there being only three holes perceptible to the naked eye in it; that is, _one_ mouth, always rounded and pursed up as if he had been whistling, and _two_ eyes, such as they were, both squinting inwards so abominably, that one guessed they were looking for his nose. Now, if a person had been set to make an inventory of his physiognomy, at first sight, against this last mentioned feature, the return would certainly have been _non est inventus_. But the curious dial _had_ a gnomon, such as it was, countersunk, it is true, in the phiz, and the wings so nicely bevelled away into the cheeks, that it could not well be vouched for either, unless when he sneezed; which, like the blowing of a whale, proved the reality of apertures, although you might not see them. His figure was short and squat; his arms peculiarly laconic; and as he always kept them in motion, like a pair of flappers, his presence might be likened to that of a turtle on its hind fins. The manner and speech of El Señor Tobias were, if possible, more odd than his outward and physical man; his delivery being a curious mixture of what appeared to be a barbarous recitative, or sing-song, and suppressed laughter; although the latter was only a nervous frittering away of the fag end of his sentences, and by no means intended to express mirth; the voice sounding as if he were choke-full of new bread, or the words had been sparked off from an ill set barrel organ, revolving in his brisket. "I hope," said I, to this beauty, "you may not be out in your reckoning about your cargo of shell being ready for you on the coast, captain?"