yarn-spinning.

For neither of us had a wheel or lookout that night; and as he and I
were the only Americans in the forward end of the ship, we naturally
sought each other for communion and counsel--he, a tall, straight, and
slim man of fifty, an ex-man-of-war's man; I, a boy, beginning the
battle of life.

Sam was an inveterate reader; and, while his diction embraced a choice
stock of profanity, which he used when aroused, it also expressed
itself in the choicest of English, his sentences full of commas,
semicolons, and periods. He reeled off his stories as though reading
from a book.

I had mentioned my boyish terror of bears, wolves, and other bugaboos
of childhood, and Sam responded with his yarn. Here it is, just as he
told it:

"She was a menagerie ship--Noah's Arks, as we called them. One of these
craft that sail out to the Orient in ballast; and, stopping at Anjer
Point for monkeys; Calcutta, Bombay, and Rangoon for elephants, tigers,
lions, and cobras; Cape Town for orang-utans and African snakes, and
over at Montevideo and Rio for wild hogs, pythons, boa-constrictors,
porcupines, and other South American jungle denizens.

"I don't know just where this craft had been to get the assorted cargo
that I saw when I shipped for the run from Rio to New York; but I found
a mess of trouble in that hold that made me think a lot, and a limited
skipper and mates that made me worry a lot. For they had stowed a mad
elephant under the fore-hatch; and this gentleman kept all hands awake
when he liked, snorting and trumpeting, with no regard for eight bells
or the watch below.

"There were Hindoo keepers aboard, but these fellows are useless in
cold weather; they shrivel up and move slowly, paralyzed by the cold.
We got the cold up in the north latitudes, just above the trades; and
it was about this time that the trouble began.

"We had the ordinary mixed crew of a Yankee ship--only, this craft was
a bark; and we had the usual bull-headed and ignorant Yankee skipper
and mates; men with no understanding of human or brute nature; men who
would rather hit you than listen to your proposition of peace. They hit
us all, and got us into a condition of mind that discounted that of the
elephant under the hatch.

"Besides that elephant there were stowed in that hold cages containing
wolves, hyenas, wild hogs, wild asses, monkeys, porcupines, and zebras.
There were three or four cages full of poisonous snakes, one variety of
wh