"Very like; but who have we here?" as a tall dark figure in jacket and trowsers, with a Spanish cap on his head, came dancing along the ridge from the house, and singing to himself, apparently in the exuberance of his spirits. He was soon close to, confronting us in the narrow road, bounding from side to side of the crumbling ledges of the footpath with the buoyancy of boyhood, although the frame, seen between me and the starlight sky, appeared Herculean. "Hillo, Walpole, what has kept you so late?" We made no answer, and the figure closed upon us. "Pray, is Mr *** at home--he, he, he?" said our skipper to the stranger. The party addressed stopped suddenly, and appeared a good deal startled. But he soon recovered himself, and answered-- "He is. May I ask who makes the enquiry in such a merry mood?" "Yes; I am the master of the Moonbeam--ha, ha, ha--a Montego bay trader, bound to the Indian coast, but obliged to put in here in distress--he, he, ho--having badly sprung some of our spars--ha, ha, ha." "Then what the h--l are you laughing at, sir?" rejoined the stranger, savagely. "Laugh--laugh--why, I am quite serious, sir--sad as a drowned rat--why, I am put in here _in distress_, sir--ha, ha, ha." It was time for me to strike in, I saw. "It is a peculiarity in the gentleman's manner, sir, and no offence is meant." "Oh, very well," said the other, laughing himself, and turning to Toby once more. "And this other?" continued he, very unceremoniously indicating myself, to be sure. "My passenger--he, he, he!"--said the man, with some discretion, as there was no use in our case of mentioning names, or being more communicative than necessary. "Oh, I see--good-night--good-night." And away sprang my gentleman, without saying another word. "He might have waited until we got time to ask him who _he was_, at any rate," said I. "Why," said Toby, "that may be a question he may have no joy in answering---ha, ha, ha!" "True for _you_, Tooraloo," said I Benjie. We arrived in front of the low building, whose windows opened on a small terrace or esplanade, like so many port-holes. It stood on a ridge of limestone-rock, _a saddle_, as it is called in the West Indies, or tongue of land, that from fifty or sixty feet high, where the house stood, dropped gradually, until it ended in a low, sandy spit, covered with a clump of cocoa-nut trees, with tufts of mangrove bushes here and there; forming the cape or foreland of the bay on the right hand as you stood in. This low point trended outwards like a hook, so as to shut in the entrance of a small concealed cove or natural creek, which lay beyond it, separated from the bay we lay in by the aforesaid tongue of land, so that the house commanded a view of both anchorages.