re steadily,
cutting off the tops of the billows and hurling the spray over the
mainyard--drenched me almost to the skin before I arrived within hail of
the fo'c's'le.

However, I reached the galley all right at last, if dripping; when, as I
looked in over the half-door that barred all admittance to the cook's
domain except to a privileged few, what did I see but Sam Jedfoot
sitting down quite cosily in front of a blazing fire he had made up
under the coppers containing the men's tea, which would be served out
bye and bye at `four bells', enjoying himself as comfortably as you
please, and actually playing the banjo--just as if he had nothing else
to do, and there was no such person as Captain Snaggs in existence!

He had his back turned to me, and so could not notice that I was there,
listening to him as he twanged the strings of the instrument and struck
up that `tink-a-tink a tong-tong' accompaniment familiar to all
acquainted with the Christy Minstrels, the cook also humming away
serenely to himself an old ditty dear to the darkey's heart, and which I
had heard the negroes often sing when I was over in New York, on the
previous voyage I had taken a few months before, to which I have already
alluded--when I ran away to sea, and shipped as a cabin boy on board one
of the Liverpool liners, occupying a similar position to that I now held
in the _Denver City_.

This was the song the cook chaunted, with that sad intonation of voice
for which, somehow or other, the light-hearted African race always seem
to have such a strange predilection. Sam touching the strings of the
banjo in harmonious chords to a sort of running arpeggio movement:--

"Oh, down in Alabama, 'fore I wer sot free,
I lubbed a p'ooty yaller girl, an' fought dat she lubbed me;
But she am proob unconstant, an' leff me hyar to tell
How my pore hart am' breakin' fo' croo-el Nancy Bell!"

He wound up with a resounding "twang" at the end of the bar, before
giving the chorus--

"Den cheer up, Sam! Don' let yer sperrits go down;
Dere's many a gal dat I'se know wal am waitin' fur you in
de town!"

"I fancy you do want cheering up, Sam," said I, waiting till he had
finished the verse. "The skipper's in a regular tantrum about you, and
says you're to come aft at once."

"My golly, sonny!" cried he, turning round, with a grin on his ebony
face, that showed all his ivories, and looking in no whit alarmed, as I
expected, at the captain's summo