wasn't
his forte), and that ------ Wardell got d------d well drownded. Hingland
haint a-goin' to let no Yankee insult nobody for nuthin'--an' I'm a
blessed Englishman. I didn't steal the wine. Yer see, Wardell arst me
off to dinner, and then we gets talkin' about polertics, an' I tells 'im
'e wos a lyin' pirut. Then he started foolin' around my woman, an' I up
with a bottle of wine an'----"

"Why, you thundering liar," said Garstang, "you stole it out of the
ward-room."

"I wouldn't call no man a liar if I was you, Mister--by G----, that
Chinaman cook knows how to make curry."

He ate like a starving shark, and between mouthfuls kept up a running
fire of lies and blasphemy. When he had eaten three platefuls of curry
and drunk enough coffee to scald a pig, the skipper, who was gettin'
tired of him, asked him if he had had enough.

Yes, he had had enough breakfast to last him a whole (Australian
adjective) week.

"Then clear out on deck and swab the curry off your face, you beast!"

"That's always the way with you tradin' skippers. A stranger don't
get no civility unless he comes aboard in a (red-painted) gig with a
(crimson) umbrella and a (gory) 'elmet 'at, like a (vermilion) Consul."

The mate seized him, and, running him up the companion way, slung him
out on deck.

*****

"What do you think of him?" asked the skipper, a man fond of a joke--it
was Bully Hayes. "I thought I'd let you all make his acquaintance. He's
been bumming around the Ladrones and Pelews since '50; used to be cook
on a Manilla trading brig, the _Espiritu Santo_."

Then he told us how this wandering mass of blasphemy got his name of
"Spreetoo Santoo." While in the brig he had been caught smuggling at
Guam by the guarda costas, and had spent a year or two in the old prison
fort at San Juan de 'Apra. (I don't know how he got out: perhaps his
inherently alcoholic breath and lurid blasphemy made the old brick wall
tumble down.)

After that he was always welcome in sailors' fo'c's'les by reason of
his smuggling story, which would commence with--"When I was cook on the
_Espiritu Santo_" (only he used the English instead of the Spanish name)
"I got jugged by the gory gardy costers," &c, &c.

*****

When we came on deck he was sitting on the main-hatch with the Chinese
carpenter--whose pipe he was smoking--and telling him that he ought to
get rid of his native wife, who was a Gilbert Island girl, and buy a
Ponape girl.

"I can git yer th