“Not for ten pounds?”
No; nor for a hundred,—go!
And my landlady rolled herself out of the room with a motion which, had she weighed less than two hundred, might have passed for a toss.
It was on the evening of this day, and after this conversation, one half of the Assembly-house at Spanish-town staring redly from the canvas in the corner, that I lay in my hammock and soliloquized as aforesaid. It was thus and then, that I resolved to paint my landlady.
And having now, by means of this long parenthesis, restored the harmonies of my story, and got my horse and cart in correct relative positions, I am ready to go ahead.
I not only resolved to paint my landlady, but I did it, right over the half-finished Assembly-house. It was the first, and, by the blessing of Heaven, so long as there are good potatoes to be dug at the rate of six cents the bushel, it shall be my last portrait. I can not help laughing, even now, at that fat, glistening face, looking for all the world as if it had been newly varnished, surmounted by a gaudy red scarf, wound round the head in the form of a peaked turban; and two fat arms, rolling down like elephants’ trunks against a white robe for a background, which concealed a bust that passeth description. That portrait—“long may it wave!” as the man said, at the Kossuth dinner, when he toasted “The day we celebrate!”
MY LANDLADY.
My landlady was satisfied, and generous withal, for she not only paid me the ten pounds, and gave me my two weeks board and lodging in the bargain, but introduced me to a colored gentleman, a friend of hers, who sailed a little schooner twice a year to the Mosquito Shore, on the coast of Central America, where he traded off refuse rum and gaudy cottons for turtle-shells and sarsaparilla. There was a steamer from Kingston, once a month, to Carthagena, Chagres, San Juan, Belize, and “along shore;” but, for obvious reasons, I could not go in a steamer. So I struck up a bargain with the fragrant skipper, by the terms of which he bound himself to land me, bag and baggage, at Bluefields, the seat of Mosquito royalty, for the sum of three pounds, “currency.”