Once he was tied to the stake, and just going to be scalped by the Indians, when some miraculous thing (I forget what at this moment) occurred to save him; once he was in the very coils of an enormous snake, and was yet preserved; and at another time, he was actually swallowed by a crocodile, (I am sure I don't know how he got down its throat without a disabling nip from some of those teeth which I have noticed in the mouths of stuffed crocodiles in museums,) and escaped by means of employing his penknife in a manner too disagreeable to describe. In short, there never was a man who, according to his own account, had gone through such a series of remarkable adventures as Uncle Joe, and I am therefore quite justified in pronouncing him to have been a most extraordinary man. I have never discovered what really was Uncle Joe's profession or occupation. For anything I know, he may have been a soldier, a sailor, or a horse-marine; though, for the matter of that, I have so little conception of what may be the duties of persons engaged in the latter profession, that I should dispute the claims of nobody who averred that he had belonged to it. All I know is, that he wore a blue coat with brass buttons, had a hooked nose and a bright eye, and only possessed one arm; the other I solemnly declare I have heard him state, on different occasions, to have been shot off in battle, lost in saving life from a shipwreck, when it got jammed between two planks of the sinking ship, and bitten off by a tiger, under circumstances the details of which I do not happen to remember--it was gone, however, anyhow, was that left-arm of Uncle Joe's, and its loss must have had this great consolation, that it furnished a foundation upon which he built many a romance, pleasing to himself, and interesting to his listeners. He had been a mighty traveller, had Uncle Joe. From Canada to the farthest extremity of South America, from Constantinople to Hong-Kong, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Cape, all was familiar to him; whilst, as to continental Europe, there seemed to be no hole or corner which he had not explored. England was like his own house to him; that is to say, he knew every county and town in one as well as he knew every room in the other. In fact, to hear him talk on these subjects, you never would for a moment have guessed that which was the real truth, namely, that he had never been further from England than Paris, and had been so particularly ill in crossing the channel that nothing but the fear of the laughter of his friends, coupled with his total and entire ignorance of the French language, prevented his settling in France for the rest of his life, sooner than again undergo the ordeal of that terrible passage.