e hands were allowed to
skylark and divert themselves--take up his banjo, which is the identical
same one that he brought home with him from Abingdon Island.

The tune he always plays, the song he always sings, is that
well-remembered one which none of us, his shipmates, can ever forget,
bringing back as it does, with its plaintive refrain, every incident of
our memorable passage across the Atlantic and round Cape Horn--aye, and
all the way up the Pacific to the Galapagos Isles.

It is full of our past life, so pregnant with its strange perils and
weird surroundings, and which ended in such a terrible catastrophe:--

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

Sam's wife, too, although she isn't a `yaller girl,' but, on the
contrary, as white as he is black, and Tom Bullover and I, with Hiram
and Jan Steenbock--should either or both happen likewise to be ashore in
Liverpool, and with us, of course, at the time--all, as regularly and
unfailingly on such occasions join in the same old chorus.

Don't you recollect it?

"Den, cheer up, Sam! don't let your sperrits go down;
Dere's many a gal dat I knows wal am waitin' fur you in de town!"

The ditty always winds up invariably, as in the old days at sea, with
the self-same sharp twang of the chords of the banjo at the end of the
last bar, that Sam used to give when sitting in the galley of the poor
_Denver City_.

"Ponk-a-tink-a-tong-tang. P-lang!"

I can hear it now.

Bless you, I can never forget that tune--no, never--brimful as it is
with the memory of our ill-fated ship.

THE END.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Island Treasure, by John Conroy Hutcheson

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