"'Ay, ay,' said Harry, 'that's arter ye've gone to Davy Jones, no doubt; but I've been in the Southsy ileyands since, myself, an' be blowed if it's much better there! Hows'ever, still anon, I took a new fancy, an' away I makes for the river, in sarch of a nigger villache, as they calls 'em; and sure enough it warn't long ere right I plumps in the midst on a lot o' cane huts amongst trees. But sich a shine and a nitty as I kicks up, ye see, bein' half-naked, for all the world like a wild man o' the woods, an' for a full hour I has the town to myself, so I hoists my shirt on a stick over the hut I took, by way of a flag o' truce, an' at last they all begins for to swarm in again. Well, ye see, I knowed the ways o' the natifs thereabouts pretty well, an' what does I do but I'd laid myself flat afore an ugly divvle of a wooden himmache, as stood on the flour, an' I wriggles and twists myself, and groans like a chap in a fit--what they calls _fittish_, thereaway--an' in course, with that they logs me down at once for a rig'lar holy 'possel from Jerusalem. The long an' the short on it was, the fittish-man takes me under charge, and sets me to tell fortins or the like with an ould quadrant they got somewheres--gives me a hut an' two black wives, begad! and there I lives for two or three weeks on end, no doubt, as proud as Tommy; when, one fine morning, what does I see off shore in the river but that confounded man-o'-war tender, all ship-shape an' ataunto again. So, my boy, I gives 'em to understand as how, bein' over vallible at home with the king of England, in course he'd sent for to puckalow me away--an' no sooner said, but the whole town gets in a fluster--the fittish-man, which a knowin' chap he was, takes and rubs me from heel to truck with ile out on a sartin nut as turned me coal-black in half-an-hour, an' as soon as I looks in the creek, mate, be blowed if I'd a knewn myself from a nigger, somehow!' "To tell the truth, as _I_ thought to myself, it was no wonder, as Master Harry's nose and lips were by no means in the classic style, and his skin, as it was, didn't appear of the whitest.