All of us still see each other now and again, even Hiram meeting us sometimes, when he ships in a liner and comes ‘across the herring pond,’ having soon got tired of a life ashore.
Our general rendezvous is a little shop kept by Sam Jedfoot, who has married a wife, and supplies goods in the ship-chandling line to vessels outward bound; for the darkey has a large acquaintance amongst stewards and such gentry who have the purchasing of the same, and being a general favourite with all this class of men—save and excepting Welshmen, whom he detests most heartily, somehow or other!
I am now a grown-up sailor, too, like Tom Bullover, and he and I always sail together in the same ship.
We are called the ‘two inseparables’ by the brokers, for one of us will never sign articles for a new vessel unless the other goes; and, when we come off a voyage and land at Liverpool old town, as frequently is the case, no sooner do we step ashore, at the Prince’s Landing Stage or in the docks, as may happen, than we ‘make tracks,’ to use Hiram Bang’s Yankee lingo, for Sam Jedfoot’s all-sorts shop, hard by in Water Street.
Here, ‘you may bet your bottom dollar,’ adopting Hiram’s favourite phrase again, we are always warmly welcomed by our old friend, the whilom darkey cook of the lost Denver City, whose wife also greets us cordially whenever we drop in to visit her ‘good man,’ as she calls him.
They are a happy couple, and much attached, though opposed in colour; and, here, of an evening, after the hearty spread which Sam invariably insists on preparing for our enjoyment, to show us that he has not lost practice in his culinary profession, I believe, as well as from his innate sense of hospitality, the ex-cook will—as regularly as he was accustomed to do on board ship in his caboose, towards the end of the second dog-watch, when, you may recollect, the hands were allowed to skylark and divert themselves—take up his banjo, which is the identical same one that he brought home with him from Abingdon Island.
The tune he always plays, the song he always sings, is that well-remembered one which none of us, his shipmates, can ever forget, bringing back as it does, with its plaintive refrain, every incident of our memorable passage across the Atlantic and round Cape Horn—aye, and all the way up the Pacific to the Galapagos Isles.
It is full of our past life, so pregnant with its strange perils and weird surroundings, and which ended in such a terrible catastrophe:—
“Oh, down in Alabama, ’fore I wer sot free,
I lubbed a p’ooty yaller gal, an’ fought dat she lubbed me,
But she am proob unconstant, an’ leff me hyar to tell
How my pore hart am breakin’ far dat croo-el Nancy Bell!”
Sam’s wife, too, although she isn’t a ‘yaller girl,’ but, on the contrary, as white as he is black, and Tom Bullover and I, with Hiram and Jan Steenbock—should either or both happen likewise to be ashore in Liverpool, and with us, of course, at the time—all, as regularly and unfailingly on such occasions join in the same old chorus.