“What?” said I.
“Which of these things slips up fust?”
“Do you mean which steam-boat goes up the river first?”
“Yes, I’ll be darned if I don’t.”
“That one,” said I pointing to the nearest.
“I’m in an awful hurry to git eout of this. It is so thundering hot, and I smell the yeller fever all reound.”
This individual had a very intellectual forehead, measuring about an inch and a quarter in height, and punched in at the sides to match. His eyes were set deep in their sockets, and something like a pig’s, only the colour was not as good. His nose pushed boldly out, as it started from the lower part of his forehead, as though it meant to be something, but when it had reached half its destination, it bent suddenly in like a parrot’s beak. His upper lip was long and thin, and was stretched on a sort of rack, which was made by a couple of supernumerary teeth, which stuck out very prominently. His chin, too modest to attempt a rivalry with his projecting lip, receded backwards towards the throat, so that, to look at him in front, you did not perceive that he had any chin at all. His hair was very light and bristly. A snuff-coloured coat of domestic manufacture adorned the upper part of his person. It was an ancient affair. The velvet was worn from the collar in several places, but which was carefully patched with red flannel, being the nearest approach to the original colour of the collar that could be found in his domestic menagerie of reserved rags. The buttons, which one would naturally look for at the bottom of the waist, had wandered up between his shoulders. The coat was remarkably long, extending from high up on the shoulders to the lower part of the calves of his legs. He was slightly round-shouldered, so that when he stood right up, a small lady might have found shelter in a rain storm in the vacancy left beween the coat and the back. His pants, to common observers, would have been called too short, but he denied this, averring that his legs were too long for his trowsers. On his arm hung an old-fashioned camblet cloak, with the lining of green baize hanging about a quarter of a yard below the edge of the camblet. He said this was no fault of the lining, anyhow; “it got wet, and t’other shrunk a leetle, but the lining stuck to it like blazes.” The Yankee was exceedingly anxious to secure his passage by the first boat, and he sang out to some person:
“Say, yeou, where is the Captain of this consarn. Say, yeou, (to some one else,) I want the Captain. Look here, Nigger, show a feller the Captain. Look here, you black sarpint, don’t stick out your lips at me. Wal, I swow, I’ll give anybody three cents that will show me the Captain.”
The Captain, hearing the noise, stepped forward, and told the Yankee if he wished to see the Captain, he was commander of the boat.
“Dew tell? Wal, I swan, you have got a kind of commanding way about you, that’s a fact.”