t,' as Tom Bullover remarked to me
confidentially, when we made our way eastwards from San Francisco
towards New York, by the Union Pacific line, a month or so afterwards.

Hiram remained behind in California, saying he had gone through enough
sailoring, and intended trying something in the farming or mining line.
But Tom, and Jan Steenbock, and I, with our old friend Sam, stuck
together to the end, taking a ship at New York for Liverpool, where we
touched English ground again, just a year almost to a day from the time
we started on our ill-starred voyage in the poor _Denver City_.

All of us still see each other now and again, even Hiram meeting us
sometimes, when he ships in a liner and comes `across the herring pond,'
having soon got tired of a life ashore.

Our general rendezvous is a little shop kept by Sam Jedfoot, who has
married a wife, and supplies goods in the ship-chandling line to vessels
outward bound; for the darkey has a large acquaintance amongst stewards
and such gentry who have the purchasing of the same, and being a general
favourite with all this class of men--save and excepting Welshmen, whom
he detests most heartily, somehow or other!

I am now a grown-up sailor, too, like Tom Bullover, and he and I always
sail together in the same ship.

We are called the `two inseparables' by the brokers, for one of us will
never sign articles for a new vessel unless the other goes; and, when we
come off a voyage and land at Liverpool old town, as frequently is the
case, no sooner do we step ashore, at the Prince's Landing Stage or in
the docks, as may happen, than we `make tracks,' to use Hiram Bang's
Yankee lingo, for Sam Jedfoot's all-sorts shop, hard by in Water Street.

Here, `you may bet your bottom dollar,' adopting Hiram's favourite
phrase again, we are always warmly welcomed by our old friend, the
whilom darkey cook of the lost _Denver City_, whose wife also greets us
cordially whenever we drop in to visit her `good man,' as she calls him.

They are a happy couple, and much attached, though opposed in colour;
and, here, of an evening, after the hearty spread which Sam invariably
insists on preparing for our enjoyment, to show us that he has not lost
practice in his culinary profession, I believe, as well as from his
innate sense of hospitality, the ex-cook will--as regularly as he was
accustomed to do on board ship in his caboose, towards the end of the
second dog-watch, when, you may recollect, th