ost a good
boat, too; but we'll soon repair the mast. We have come ashore just
now, however, mainly for a stroll."

"Ay," put in Phil Briant, who was amusing the black children--and
greatly delighting himself by nodding and smiling ferociously at them,
with a view to making a favourable impression on the natives of this new
country. "Ay, sir, an' sure we've comed to land a sick shipmate who
wants to see the doctor uncommon. Have ye sich an article in these
parts?"

"No, not exactly," replied the trader, "but I do a little in that way
myself; perhaps I may manage to cure him if he comes up to my house."

"We wants a nigger too," said Rokens, who, while the others were
talking, was extremely busy filling his pipe.

At this remark the trader looked knowing.

"Oh!" he said, "that's your game, is it? There's your man there; I've
nothing to do with such wares."

He pointed to the Portuguese slave-dealer as he spoke.

Seeing himself thus referred to, the slave-dealer came forward, hat in
hand, and made a polite bow. He was a man of extremely forbidding
aspect. A long dark visage, which terminated in a black peaked beard,
and was surmounted by a tall-crowned broad-brimmed straw hat, stood on
the top of a long, raw-boned, thin, sinewy, shrivelled, but powerful
frame, that had battled with and defeated all the fevers and other
diseases peculiar to the equatorial regions of Africa. He wore a short
light-coloured cotton jacket and pantaloons--the latter much too short
for his limbs, but the deficiency was more than made up by a pair of
Wellington boots. His natural look was a scowl. His assumed smile of
politeness was so unnatural, that Tim Rokens thought, as he gazed at
him, he would have preferred greatly to have been frowned at by him.
Even Ailie, who did not naturally think ill of any one, shrank back as
he approached and grasped Glynn's hand more firmly than usual.

"Goot morning, gentl'm'n. You was vish for git nigger, I suppose."

"Well, we wos," replied Tim, with a faint touch of sarcasm in his tone.
"Can _you_ get un for us?"

"Yees, sare, as many you please," replied the slave-dealer, with a wink
that an ogre might have envied. "Have great many ob 'em stay vid me
always."

"Ah! then, they must be fond o' bad company," remarked Briant, in an
undertone, "to live along wid such a alligator."

"Well, then," said Tim Rokens, who had completed the filling of his
pipe, and was now in the full enjoyment