“But it don’t signify, Wagtail will be delighted to see you, Tom hospitable fellow Wagtail--and, now I recollect myself, Fyall and Aaron Bang are to be there; dang it, were it not for the gout, we should have a night on’t!” After breakfast we started in a canoe for Kingston, touching at the Firebrand for my kit. Moses Yerk, the unpoetical first lieutenant, was standing well forward on the quarterdeck as I passed over the side to get into the canoe, with the gunroom steward following me, carrying my kit under his arm. “I say, Tom, good for you, one lark after another.” “Don’t like that fellow,” quoth Whiffle; “he is quarrelsome in his drink for a thousand, I know it by the cut of his jib.” He had better have held his tongue, honest man; for as he looked up broad in Yerk’s face, who was leaning over the hammocks, the scupper immediately over head, through whose instrumentality I never knew, was suddenly cleared, and a rush of dirty water, that had been lodged there since the decks had been washed down at daydawn, splashed slapdash over his head and shoulders and into his mouth, so as to set the dear little man a-coughing so violently that I thought he would have been throttled. Before he had recovered sufficiently to find his tongue, we had pulled fifty yards from the ship, and a little farther on we overtook the captain, who had preceded us in the cutter, into which we transhipped ourselves. But Whiffle never could acquit Yerk of having been, directly or indirectly, the cause of his suffering from the impure shower. This day was the first of the Negro Carnival or Christmas Holydays, and at the distance of two miles from Kingston the sound of the negro drums and horns, the barbarous music and yelling of the different African tribes, and the more mellow singing of the Set Girls, came off upon the breeze loud and strong.