ve us some trouble," said Christian.
"Come, let's go at 'em at once."

This estimate of the cats was fully justified by what followed. A
considerable number of these useful creatures, black, white, and grey,
had been brought from Otaheite for the purpose of keeping down the rats,
with which many of the South Sea Islands are afflicted. During the
voyage most of them had retired to the privacy of the hold, where they
found holes and corners about the cargo, and came out only at night,
like evil spirits, to pick up a precarious livelihood. During the
recent conflict a few had found insecure refuge in holes and corners
about the deck, where yelling and fugitive pigs had convulsed them with
horror; and one, a huge grey cat, having taken madly to the rigging,
rushed out to the end of the foresail-yard, where it was immediately
roused to frenzy by a flock of astonished gulls. Now, these cats had to
be rummaged out of their retreats by violence, in which work all the
white men in the ship had to take part amid a chorus of awful skirling,
serpentlike fuffing, ominous and deadly growling, and, generally,
hideous caterwauling, that no pen, however gifted, could adequately
describe.

"_I_ see 'im," cried Mills, with his head thrust down between a
nail-cask and a bundle of Otaheitan roots.

"Where?" from John Adams, who, with heels and legs in the air, and head
and shoulders down somewhere about the keel, was poking a long stick
into total darkness.

"There, right under you, with a pair of eyes blazing like green lamps."

A poke in the right direction caused a convulsion in the bowels of the
cargo like a miniature earthquake. It was accompanied by a fearful
yell.

"I've touched him at last," said Adams, quietly. "Look-out there,
Brown, he's goin' to scramble up the bulkhead."

"There goes another," shouted Martin, whose head was so far down among
the cargo that his voice had a muffled sound.

There was no occasion to ask where this time, for, with a wild shriek, a
large black fellow left its retreat, sprang up the hatchway, and sought
refuge in the rigging. At the same moment there came a sepulchral moan
from a cat whose place of refuge was invaded by Quintal. The moan was
followed by a cry, loud and deep, that would have done credit to a mad
baby.

"Isn't it appalling to see creeturs so furious?" said Adams, solemnly,
as he drew his head and shoulders out of the depths.

"They're fiendishly inclined, no doubt,"