piece of the green leaf of some plant, apparently for the purpose of
shielding itself from the sun, for they held up their shades just in the
same way as a lady carries her parasol; when, all at once, I heard a
heavy step outside, advancing along the terrace from the direction of
the stables.

Without turning my head, or consulting watch or clock--or, even without
looking up at the scorching sun overhead, had my eyes been sufficiently
glare-proof to have stood the ordeal--I knew who the intruder was, and
could have also told you that it was exactly mid-day.

Why?--you may ask perhaps.

You will learn in a moment.

The heavy footstep came a pace nearer, and then paused; when, looking
round, I beheld an old negro, with a withered monkey-like face, clad in
the ordinary conventional costume of an African labourer in the West
Indies. His dress consisted of a loose pair of trousers and shirt of
blue cotton check; and, on the top of his white woolly head was fixed on
in some mysterious fashion a battered fragment of a straw hat, just of
the sort that would be used by an English farmer as a scarecrow to
frighten off the birds from his fields.

This was Pompey, Jake's rival; and, as he politely doffed his ragged
head-gear with one hand, in deference to my dignity as "the young
massa," he held out to me with his other paw a wine-glass whose foot, if
ever it had one, had been broken-off at some remote period of time.

I knew what Pompey wanted as well as he did himself, but for my own
amusement, and in order to hear him make his usual stereotyped
announcement, I asked him a leading question.

"Well, what is it?" I said.

"U'm come, rum!" was his laconic rejoinder--nothing more, but the
sentence was sufficiently expressive.

Every day of the week, with the exception of Sundays, it had been always
Pompey's privilege to have a quartern of rum served out to him, as if he
were on board ship, at twelve o'clock, the ordinary grog-time; and,
punctually at that hour every day, in the wet season or dry, he never
failed to come up to the house for his allowance, bringing with him the
footless wine-glass to receive the grateful liquor. His appearance,
consequently, was an unfailing token that the sun had crossed the zenith
and that it was time to "make it eight bells."

Unlike the majority of his dark-complexioned brethren, who are generally
loquacious in the extreme, Pompey was singularly reticent of speech,
never varying this