OCR Text |
Show j flioTRODINFV; j! 1 1 Or, The Adventures of j J I An Eton Boy... 2 I hold, for the slime in these canebrakeg was as thick as tar and black, as old bilge-water. "One day he was soothing his ex- , citement by beating me with a heavy bamboo, till my back and arms were covered with blood. Close by were a whole gang of the tribe squatted under un-der a palm tree, smoking bubbles bubbles made out of nut shells, looking look-ing on and laughing at the torture I vtas undergoing; but In the midst of j. their sport we heard a roar that made our hearts tremble, and all ready to : scamper off. "There was a mighty crashing and swaying of the wild canes in the adjacent ad-jacent brake, and then a great, square-headed square-headed and tawny-haired lion, as large as a good-sized pony, and with a tuft like a swab at the end of his switching tail, came plunging forward, with eyes flashing and red mouth open. "Souse as a sheet anchor goes into the sea, he sprang upon my owner, and in the time I take to turn this quid, Master Rodney, that troublesome trouble-some personage was borne off into the Jungle, a bruised mass of bones and blood, dangling in his jaws. "The whole thing passed like a flash of lightning! "At first the niggers were about to pursue the lion, but upon reflection they thought it less dangerous to fall upon me and kill me outright, saying that my stupid cries had brought the wild animal upon them. Then an old fellow, whose wool had become white with age, who was coiled up in the root of a tree, where he generally berthed himself, and who was considered consid-ered a wise man, came forward and demanded de-manded their attention. He had been a brave fellow in his time, for he wore a row of human teeth at his neck, all strung on a lanyard, with a bit of an old quart bottle which . he had found upon the beach, and wore as a 'great medicine,' or order of the garter, gar-ter, perhaps. He saved me hy saying in their outlandish gibberish that I was evidently under the protection of the great fetish, in honor of whom I should be made like themselves and handsomely tattooed. "I might as well have hallooed to the wind In a tearing pampero, or a stiff reef-topsail breeze, Master Rodney, Rod-ney, as have attempted to oppose this piece of Congo kindness. In a minute I was hove down under the nasty, black paws of five-and-forty howling and jabbering niggers, all smearing me with palm-oil out of calabashes and old gallipots, and they persisted in rubbing it into me till all my skin was nearly peeled off. "Then the old fetishman, who lived in the root of the tree, after making : three summersets and uttering six howls, ornamented all my face, hands and arms in this fashion, using a kind of knife, which he dipped from time to time in some black stuff that he carried on a cocoanut shell. In ten minutes I was all over serpents and circles, stripes, pothooks and hangers! hang-ers! "It went to my heart to have my beauty spoiled, but I was far past making mak-ing any opposition, and so I have had to go through life in all weathers, with a face like the clown's in a pantomime. panto-mime. "They made me so like a nigger that they scarcely knew me from one of themselves. This so favored my escape es-cape that I soon found an opportunity of giving the Mussolongos the slip in the night, and made a shift, after many a break-heart adventure, to reach a British settlement. (To be continued.) i . CHAPTER VII (Continued.) The vines, In luxuriance, bordered the pathway as we ascended, and it is aid that for years after the wine has been taken from these Isles to England, or elsewhere, it always ferments and becomes agitated when the vlnerle3 from whence it came are in bloom; but this tale may perhaps be as true as the accounts of these mighty ruins which Pliny avers once covered all the Fortunate Islands, but of which no trace remains now. Tom Lambourne and I, after a ramble ram-ble of some hours, found ourselves in a wild and solitary place, where blocks of lava and heaps of yellow pumice dust were lying among shattered masses of basalt, which were studded with spars and crystals that glittered as the sunshine streamed through a ravine upon them. The sides of the ravine were clothed with rich copsewood and little thickets of the retama-blanca, which there grows about ten feet high, and is covered cov-ered with tufts of odoriferous flowers. flow-ers. The distant sea, the waves "of which Beeemed to bask or sleep in the sunshine, sun-shine, closed the perspective of this ravine; ra-vine; and there we could see the Eugenie Eu-genie at anchor, with her snow white courses loose and her other canvas neatly handled. Being warmed by our walk, we sat down within the mouth of a species of natural grotto, formed by masses of lava and basalt, which in some past age the throes of the volcano had thrown and heaped together. There a clear spring gurgled joyously from a fissure in the rocks; and now, opening the courier bag, we proceeded to make our breakfast on the viands I had brought from the ship to wit, bologna sausage and biscuits, with brandy and water. The air was deliciously clear, and over the brow of the rocky chasm in which we sat, there fell a natural screen of all the wild Indian fig and vine creepers.and these shaded us from the increasing .heat of the morning sun. All was still there. We heard only the coo of the great wood pigeons among the gorgeous foliage, foli-age, or the sweet notes of the little golden colored canary birds, as they twittered about us when we scared them from their nests, which they usually build in the barrancas or water-courses, such being the coolest places in that volcanic isle. CHAPTER VIII. How Tom Was Tattooed. My companion was a short and thickset thick-set sailor, about forty years of age, and whose figure was suggestive of great muscular strength; his hair was cut short, but his whiskers were of the most voluminous description, as he was anxious to conceal as much as possible of the strange circles, stripes, and grotesque designs with which his sun-burned face was covered, and which, by their form and blackness, imparted a hideous aspect of features that otherwise were rather good looking look-ing and pleasing. He was an intelligent man, and well read, for the humble class to which he belonged. "Aye, Master Rodney," said he, on perceiving that I was still surveying him with something of wonder (and his face was a point on which he was particularly sensitive); "you see what a precious figure-head these 'tarnal niggers on the coast of Africa made for me." "How did this happen, Tom?" said I, filling his drinking horn. "About twenty years ago, Master Rodney, I belonged to the Arrow, a smart Liverpool bark of two hundred and twenty tons register. I made many voyages in her to South America, Ameri-ca, but at last, as bad luck, or my destiny des-tiny (as men say in the play) would have it, she was chartered for the west coast of Africa, to trade with the natives, na-tives, but not In black cattle, for slavery slav-ery was never our line of business. "We sailed from the Mersey in June, and early In August found ourselves at the mouth of the Congo river, after a prosperous voyage; but on the night we made the land, a heavy gale came on, and It veered round all the points of the compass in an hour. The sea and the sky was as black as they could be, and everything else was black too, except the breakers on ahe shore to leeward, and heaven knows they were white enough too white and too near to be pleasant. "Our skipper handled the Arrow well, and she obeyed every touch of the helm as a horse might do its bridle; she was sharply built, but heavily sparred, and no other square-rigged square-rigged craft upon the sea could beat her on a wind. "I think I see her yet. Master Rodney, Rod-ney, for she was the first vessel I shipped on board of. and hang me if I didn't love her as if she had been my old mother's house, near Deptford docks. "Her hull was long and low. and sat like a swan in the water, only that she was not white, like a swan, but as black as paint could make her. Aloft, the masis tapered away like fishing-rods, crossed by the square yards, while stays, shrouds, halyards and hamper were always taut, as if made of cast-iron; but for all this, she failed to weather that 5.le oft th Congo river. She missed stays and got sternway, so you see, sir, it was soon all over with her after that." "How? I do not understand." "Don't you know what sternway is? What do they teach folks ashore? She was taken aback in the hurricane the most dangerous thing that can happen to any vessel a sudden shift of wind threw her on her broadside in the trough of the sea, and with her deck toward the storm, so her hatches were soon beaten in all the sooner that she was driven on a coral reef near the Shark's Nose, where the sea was like a sheet of foam around her. "Five poor fellows were washed away and drowned; but when day broke, and the storm abated a little, the captain, six men and I got ashore in the long boat, just as the poor Arrow Ar-row began to break up, for we could see the waves beating into her and rending asunder the decks, the inner and outer sheathing, as if they couldn't scatter the cargo fast enough far and wide. "Well, there we were, shipwrecked in a wild place on the west coast of Africa, at a part of the Congo river where the mangrove trees grow into the water, and have their lower branches covered with oysters and barnacles. bar-nacles. "We could see high blue hills in the distance when the sun came up from the cane swamps and the wild woods which bordered the river, and we sat on the beach for a while looking ruefully rue-fully at the wreck, of which little now remained but a few timbers, till the increase of the morning heat drove us for shelter into a grove of oil-palms, and there, Master Rodney, we found tulips, lilies and hyacinths growing wild, and six times larger than you ever saw in England. "Some of our men proposed that we should repair the longboat she was partly stove in and put to sea, or creep in along the coast until we were picked up. We were without carpenter's carpen-ter's tools; but the captain had a case of surgical instruments, and the first use we made of the saw was to cut into halves an iron buoy which had floated ashore from the wreck. "Thus we had two kettles, in which we boiled some seabirds and their eggs, and made a mess whereupon we breakfasted. Exhausted by the late storm, the birds were easily knocked down by stones as they sat with drooping droop-ing wings upon the rocks near the sea; but scarcely was our miserable meal over when we heard loud' yells, and, attracted by the smoke of our fire, down came a whole gang of ugly darkies, dar-kies, all Mussolongos, wild and naked, with rings or fishbones in their long ears and flat noses all streaked with war-paint and shouting like madmen as they brandished their muskets and spears. "They fired a volley, which stretched on the earth the poor captain and all my shipmates, dortd or dying. The latter lat-ter they soon dispatched with their knives and spears, and left them to be eaten by wild animals; but on finding that I had escaped their bullets, they supposed that their fetish had protected pro-tected me, and so for a time I was safe. "For a whole week I was forced to help these savages in the work of taking tak-ing all that remained of the wreck to pieces, though hundreds came from the interior, and they wrought hard, some men using even their filed teeth to get all the iron and copper bolts, which they prized more than the cargo, car-go, sails or spars, as they could fashion fash-ion them into weapons and the heads of spears and arrows. But with everything every-thing they could lay their dingy hands upon, myself included, they made off inland, just as a vessel, which proved to be a king's ship, came round the Shark's Nose, and thus, with help, protection and liberty at hand, I was more than ever a prisoner. "I was in very low spirits, you may be sure, fearing they only intended to fatten me up, like a stall-fed ox, or a turtle in a tub, before cooking and eating me, or making me a sacrifice to some idol carved of wood; for many times I saw the whole 'tarnal tribe on their knees before the figure-head of the Arrow, which had been washed ashore, and was pronounced to be a fetish. "For three days we traveled among deep and slimy-green swamps, thick, wild woods and Immense pathless canebrakes, where in an hour I saw more tree leopards and zebras, howling howl-ing jackals and antelopes, grinning monkeys and chattering paroquets, than ever were seen in all the shows at Greenwich fair, till we arrived at a kraal of a hundred huts, for all the world like pigsties, surrounded by a high palisade of bamboos, and situated in a forest of palms. "I was now the slave of a chief, whose rigging was rather queer, for it consisted only of a deep fringe, or kilt, of unplalted grass, a necklace of lion's teeth and fishbones, and a cap of leopard's leop-ard's skin, on which towered a plume of feathers, above a row of human teeth and sea shells. "Being rope-ended by an lnch-and-a-half colt aye, or keelhauled once a day from the foreyardarm were jokes when compared to all this African nigger made me undergo, in pestilent swamp3. where the very air choked me, as if I bad been p a ship silh a foul |