Ill as I was, however, I could perceive that all this row had now more of a tipsy frolic in it--whatever it might have had at first--than absolute fear; for the red-faced visitor, and Mr Fyall, as if half ashamed, speedily extricated themselves from the chaos of chairs and living creatures, righted the table, replaced the candles, and having sat down, looking as grave as judges on the bench, Aaron Bang exclaimed--“I’ll bet a dozen, it is the poor fellow himself returned on our hands, half-dead from the rascally treatment he has met with at the hands of these smuggling thieves!” “Smugglers, or no,” said Fyall, “you are right for once, my peony rose, I do believe.” But Aaron was a leetle staggered, notwithstanding, when I stumped towards him, as already described, and he shifted back and back as I advanced, with a most laughable cast of countenance, between jest and earnest, while Fyall kept shouting to him--“If it be his ghost, try him in Latin, Mr Bang--speak Latin to him, Aaron Bang--nothing for a ghost like Latin, it is their mother tongue.” Bang, who, it seemed, plumed himself on his erudition, forthwith began “Quae maribus solum tribuunter.” Aaron’s conceit of exorcising a spirit with the fag-end of an old grammar rule would have tickled me under most circumstances; but I was far past laughing. I had more need, God help me, to pray. I made another step. He hitched his chair back. “Bam, Bo, Rem!” shouted the incipient planting attorney. Another hitch, which carried him clean out of the supper-room, and across the narrow piazza; but, in this last movement, he made a regular false step, the two back feet of his chair dropping over the first step of the front stairs, whereupon he lost his balance, and toppling over, vanished in a twinkling, and rolled down half-a-dozen steps, heels over head, until he lay sprawling on the manger or mule-trough before the door, where the Ceases are fed under busha’s own eye on all estates--for this excellent and most cogent reason, that otherwise the maize or guinea-com, belonging of right to poor mulo, would generally go towards improving the condition, not of the quadruped, but of the biped quashiet who had charge of him--and there he lay in a convulsion of laughter. The two seamen, who supported me between them, were at first so completely dumfoundered by all this, that they could not speak. At length, however, Timothy Tailtackle lost his patience, and found his tongue. “This may be Jamaica frolic, good gentlemen, and all very comical in its way; but, d----n me, if it be either gentlemanlike or Christian like, to be after funning and fuddling, while a fellow creature, and his Majesty’s commissioned officer to boot, stands before you, all but dead of one of your blasted fevers.”