"When I was playing wid my brudder,
'Appy was I;
Oh take me to my kind old mudder,
Dere let me lib and die.
"All the world am sad and dreary,
Ebberywhere I roam;
Oh darkies, how my 'art grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!"
Alas, it was grotesquely horrible!
The calmness of the night, the sickness of my heart, the weakness of my limbs, and the sweetness of the violin as its notes floated far over the moonlit sea, together with the monotonous sound of the oars, made me fall into a waking doze—yet I still tugged mechanically on, though dreaming.
At times I imagined that I was in a dense fog off the harbour mouth of St. John. I heard the booming of the fog-guns from the battery on the mountains, though they sounded faint and far off. Then followed the welcome voice of the gunner on the low rocky point of Fort Amherst, challenging as usual—
"What ship is that?"
I strove to answer as we ran in through the Narrows, but my tongue refused its office.
Again, I was at my desk, engrossing in giant ledgers, with the snorting voice of old Uriah Skrew grating on my ear. Anon I was in my father's rose-covered villa at Peckham—in London, amid the roar and gaiety of its streets—its evening bustle and lights—in the theatre—at the opera—galloping out of town on the Derby-day. Then I was in a silent forest—but lo!
My dreams were broken by a shriek which made us all start as if electrified—the oarsmen at the oars, the sleepers at the bottom of the boat. Cuffy dropped his violin, and Reeves his tiller, as we all sprang up, looked in each other's sunken eyes, and on the glassy sea, that rippled in flat immensity far away in the moonlight.
"What is it—where did it come from?" we all gasped.