m the galley,
so that I could now enter without contest. One door had been already
blocked with rice; the place was in part darkness, full of a foul stale
smell, and a cloud of nasty flies; it had been left, besides, in some
disorder, or else the birds, during their time of tenancy, had knocked
the things about; and the floor, like the deck before we washed it, was
spread with pasty filth. Against the wall, in the far corner, I found
a handsome chest of camphor-wood bound with brass, such as Chinamen and
sailors love, and indeed all of mankind that plies in the Pacific. From
its outside view I could thus make no deduction; and, strange to
say, the interior was concealed. All the other chests, as I have said
already, we had found gaping open, and their contents scattered abroad;
the same remark we found to apply afterwards in the quarters of the
seamen; only this camphor-wood chest, a singular exception, was both
closed and locked.

I took an axe to it, readily forced the paltry Chinese fastening, and,
like a Custom-House officer, plunged my hands among the contents. For
some while I groped among linen and cotton. Then my teeth were set
on edge with silk, of which I drew forth several strips covered with
mysterious characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised
them as a kind of bed-hanging popular with the commoner class of the
Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of
an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk
handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking
opium, with a liberal provision of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had
been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the
chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile? It
was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded
as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why
should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were
rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come by that second chest, with
which (according to the clerk at the What Cheer) he had started for
Honolulu?

"And how have YOU fared?" inquired the captain, whom I found luxuriously
reclining in our mound of litter. And the accent on the pronoun, the
heightened colour of the speaker's face, and the contained excitement
in his tones, advertised me at once that I had not been alone to make
discoveries.

"I have found a