s were not insufferable, and
might have been worse.

While they are enjoying their repose, we will tell in a few sentences
who they were and how they got there.

When Mark Breezy, in the closing years of his medical-student career,
got leave to go on a voyage to China in one of his father's ships, the
_Eastern Star_, for the benefit of his health and the enlargement of his
understanding, he had no more idea that that voyage would culminate in a
bed up a tree in the forests of Madagascar than you, reader, have that
you will ultimately become an inhabitant of the moon! The same remark
may with equal truth be made of John Hockins when he joined the _Eastern
Star_ as an able seaman, and of James Ginger--alias Ebony--when he
shipped as cook. If the captain of the _Eastern Star_ had introduced
those three,--who had never seen each other before--and told them that
they would spend many months together among savages in the midst of
terrestrial beauty, surrounded by mingled human depravity and goodness,
self-denial and cruelty, fun and tragedy such as few men are fated to
experience, they would have smiled at each other with good-natured
scepticism and regarded their captain as a facetious lunatic.

Yet so it turned out, though the captain prophesied it not--and this was
the way of it.

Becalmed off the coast of Madagascar, and having, through leakage in one
of the tanks, run short of water, the captain ordered a boat with casks
to be got ready to go ashore for water. The young doctor got leave to
land and take his gun for the purpose of procuring specimens--for he was
something of a naturalist--and having a ramble.

"Don't get out of hail, Doctor," said the captain, as the boat shoved
off.

"All right, sir, I won't."

"An' take a couple o' the men into the bush with you in case of
accidents."

"Ay ay, sir," responded Mark, waving his hand in acknowledgment.

And that was the last that Mark Breezy and the captain of the _Eastern
Star_ saw of each other for many a day.

"Who will go with me?" asked Mark, when the boat touched the shore.

"Me, massa," eagerly answered the negro cook, who had gone ashore in the
hope of being able to get some fresh vegetables from the natives if any
were to be found living there. "Seems to me dere's no black mans here,
so may's well try de woods for wild wegibles."

"No no, Ebony," said the first mate, who had charge of the boat, "you'll
be sure to desert if we let you go--unless