seemed thoroughly dissatisfied, complaining of their grub and
everything.

Some of them declared, too, that the vessel was unlucky and under a
curse, saying that they heard strange noises at night in the hold,
though I did not think much of this, Tom and Hiram between them having
nearly succeeded in chaffing me out of my belief in having seen Sam
Jedfoot's ghost.

On getting a fair wind again, the ship, which had lost almost a lunar
month through bad weather and calms and no weather at all, began to
travel once more southward, steering almost west-sou'-west on the port
tack; but as we reached down the South American coast-line towards Cape
Horn, we nearly came to grief on the Abralhos, the _Denver City_ just
escaping laying her bones there by the `skin of her teeth,' to use Tom
Bullover's expression to me next morning, as I was serving out the
coffee--the peril having been met in the middle watch, when I was
asleep, and knew nothing about it until it was over and we were sailing
on serenely once more.

Then, again, off the mouth of the La Plata, when nearly opposite Buenos
Ayres, although, of course, some five hundred miles or more from the
land, we suddenly encountered a terrific `pampero,' as the storms of
that region are styled; and, if Captain Snaggs hadn't smelt this coming
in time, we should have been dismasted and probably gone to the bottom
with all hands.

As it was, we only managed to furl the upper sails and clew up the
courses before the wind caught us, heeling the vessel over almost
broadside on to the sea; and then everything had to be let go by the
run, the ship scudding away right before the gale, as if towed by wild
horses, with the sheets and halliards and everything flying--for, at
first, the hail that accompanied the wind beat down on us so fearfully
that no one was able to face it and go aloft.

That night, one of the hands who came up to the galley to light his
pipe, and who had previously spoken of the noises he had noticed, as he
said, about the deck during the still hours of the early morning, when
all sounds seem so much louder than in the daytime, both aboard ship and
ashore, declared that during the height of the pampero he had heard Sam
Jedfoot's voice distinctly singing that old negro ballad of which he
used to be so fond when in life, chaunting it almost regularly every
evening on the fo'c's'le to the accompaniment of his banjo:--

"Oh, down in Alabama, 'fore I wer sot free,
I