ll
places in the world, in your head at the present moment?"

"Ah, that'd tell a tale, sir," he answered, cocking his left eye in a
knowing manner, and giving the quid in his mouth a turn. "Ah, that'd
tell a tale, sir!"

Jim Newman, an old man-of-war's man--now retired from the navy, and who
eked out his pension by letting boats for hire to summer visitors--was
leaning against an old coal barge that formed his "office," drawn up
high and dry on the beach, midway between Southsea Castle and Portsmouth
Harbour, and gazing out steadily across the channel of the Solent, to
the Isle of Wight beyond. He and I were old friends of long standing,
and I was never so happy as when I could persuade him--albeit it did not
need much persuasion--to open the storehouse of his memory, and spin a
yarn about his old experiences afloat in the whilom wooden walls of
England, when crack frigates were the rage instead of screw steamers
with armour-plates. We had been talking of all sorts of service
gossip--the war, the weather, what not--when he suddenly asked me the
question about the great African river that has given poor Sambo "a
local habitation and a name."

Although the gushing tears of April had hardly washed away the traces of
the wild March winds, the weather had suddenly become almost tropical in
its heat. There was not the slightest breath of air stirring, and the
sea lay lazily asleep, only throbbing now and then with a faint
spasmodic motion, which barely stirred the shingle on the shore, much
less plashed on the beach; while a thick, heavy white mist was steadily
creeping up from the sea, shutting out, first the island, and then the
roadstead at Spithead from view, and overlapping the whole landscape in
thick woolly folds, moist yet warm. Jim had said that the sea-fog,
coming as it did, was a sign of heat, and that we should have a regular
old-fashioned hot summer, unlike those of recent years.

"Ah, sir," he repeated, "I could tell a tale about that deadly Niger
river, and the Gaboon, and the whole treacherous coast, if I liked, from
Lagos down to the Congo--ay, I could! It was that 'ere sea-fog that put
Afriker into my head, Master Charles; I know that blessed white mist, a-
rising up like a curtain, well, I do! The `white man's shroud,' the
niggers used to call it--and many a poor beggar it has sarved to shroud,
too, in that killing climate, confound it!"

"Well, Jim, tell us about the Niger to begin with," said