“John Lodge, massa, if you please, massa; blackie is not politeful, sir;” whereupon he showed his white teeth again. “Well, well, John Lodge, you are running us in too close surely;” and the remark seemed seasonable enough to a stranger, for the rocks on the bold shore were now within half pistol shot. “Mind your eye,” shouted old Anson. “You will have us ashore, you black rascal!” “You, sir, what water have you here?” sung out Mr Splinter. “Salt water, massa,” rapped out Lodge, fairly dumfounded by such a volley of questions--“You hab six fadom good here, massa;” but suspecting he had gone too far--“I take de Tonnant, big ship as him is, close to dat reef, sir, you might have jump ashore, so you need not frighten for your leetle dish of a hooker; beside, massa, my character is at stake, you know”--then another grin and bow. There was no use in being angry with the poor fellow, so he was allowed to have his own way until we anchored in the evening at Port Royal. The morning after we arrived, I went ashore with a boat’s crew to perform the magnanimous operation of cutting brooms; we pulled ashore for Green Bay, under the guns of the Twelve Apostles--a heavy battery of twelve cannon, where there is a tombstone with an inscription, setting forth that the party over whom it was erected, had been actually swallowed up in the great earthquake that destroyed the opposite town, but subsequently disgorged again; being, perchance, an unseemly morsel. We approached the beach--“Oars”--the men laid them in. “What sort of nuts be them, Peter Coamings?” said the coxswain to a new hand who had been lately impressed, and was now standing at the bow ready to fend off. Peter broke off one of the branches from the bush nearest him. “Smite my timbers, do the trees here bear shellfish?”