So I set to and ransacked the lockers, where, amongst a vast variety of miscellaneous matters, I was not long in finding a bottle of very tolerable rum, some salt junk, some biscuit, and a goglet or porous earthen jar of water, with some capital cigars. By this time I was like to faint with the heat and smell; so I filled a tumbler with good half-and-half and swigged it off. The effect was speedy; I thought I could eat a bit, so I attacked the salt junk and made a hearty meal, after which I replenished my tumbler, lighted a cigar, pulled off my coat and waistcoat, and, with a sort of desperate glee, struck up at the top of my pipe, “Ye Mariners of England.” My joviality was soon noticed on deck. “Eh, what be that?” quoth Obed,--“that be none of our ditties, I guess? who is singing below there?’ “We be all on deck, sir,’ responded Paul. “It can’t be the spy, eh?--sure enough it must be he, and no one else; the heat and choke must have made him mad.” “We shall soon see,” said Paul, as he removed the skylight, and looked down into the cabin. Obed looked over his shoulder, peering at me with his little short-sighted pig’s eyes, into which, in my pot valiancy, I immediately chucked half a tumbler of very strong grog, and under cover of it attempted to bolt through the scuttle, and thereby gain the deck; but Paul, with his shoulder of mutton fist, gave me a very unceremonious rebuff, and down I dropped again. “You makes yourself at home, I sees, and be hanged to you,” said Obed, laying the emphasis on the last word, pronouncing it “yoo--oo” in two syllables. “I do, indeed, and be d----d to yoo--oo,” I replied; “and why should I not? the visit was not volunteered, you know so come down, you long-legged Yankee smuggling scoundrel, or I’ll blow your bloody buccaneering craft out of the water like the peel of an onion. You see I have got the magazine scuttle up, and there are the barrels of powder, and here is the candle, so”-- Obed laughed like the beginning of the bray of the jackass before he swings off into his “heehaw, heehaw.”--“Smash my eyes, man, but them barrels be full of pimento, all but that one with the red mark, and that be crackers fresh and sharp from the Brandywine mills.” “Well, well, gunpowder or pimento, I’ll set fire to it if you don’t be civil.” “Why, I will be civil; you are a curious chap, a brave slip, to carry it so, with no friend near; so, civil I will be.” He unlocked the companion hatch and came down to the cabin, doubling his long limbs up like foot-rules, to suit the low roof.