In the frenzy of his rage, he dashed this into his opponent’s face, and
they both stripped in a second. Separating several yards, they levelled
their heads like two telescopes on stands, and ran butt at each other
like ram-goats, and quite as odoriferous, making the welkin ring again
as their flint-hard skulls cracked together. Finding each other
invulnerable in this direction, they closed, and began scrambling and
biting and kicking, and tumbling over and over in the sand; while the
skipper and I stood by cheering them on, and nearly suffocated with
laughter. They never once struck with their closed fists I noticed; so
they were not much hurt. It was great cry and little wool; and at
length they got tired, and hauled off by mutual consent, finishing off
as usual with an appeal to us--“beg one feepenny, massa!”
At six o’clock we drove to Mr Pepperpot Wagtail’s. The party was a
bachelor’s one, and, when we walked up the front steps, there was our
host in person, standing to receive us at the door; while, on each side
of him, there were five or six of his visitors, all sitting with their
legs cocked up, their feet resting on a sort of surbase, above which the
jealousies, or movable blinds of the piazza, were fixed.
I was introduced to the whole party seriatim--and as each of the cock
legs dropped his trams, he started up, caught hold of my hand, and wrung
it as if I had been his dearest and oldest friend.
Were I to designate Jamaica as a community, I would call it a
handshaking people. I have often laughed heartily upon seeing two
cronies meeting in the streets of Kingston after a temporary separation;
when about pistol-shot asunder, both would begin to tug and rug at the
right-hand glove, but it is frequently a mighty serious affair in that
hissing hot climate to get the gauntlet off; they approach,--one, a
smart urbane little man, who would not disgrace St James’s Street, being
more kiln-dried and less moist in his corporeals than his country
friend, has contrived to extract his paw, and holds it out in act to
shake.
“Ah! how do you do, Ratoon?” quoth the Kingston man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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