I was lifted out of the hammock, and supported to the door between two
seamen. The fresh, nice--looking man before mentioned, Aaron Bang,
Esquire, by name, an incipient planting attorney in the neighbourhood, of
great promise, was in the act of singing a song, for it was during some
holyday--time, which had broken down the stiff observances of a Jamaica
planter's life. There he sat, lolling back on his chair, with his feet
upon the table, and a cigar, half consumed, in his hand. He had twisted
up his mouth and mirth--provoking nose, which, by an unaccountable
control over some muscle, present in the visage of no other human being,
he made to describe a small circle round the centre of his face, and
slewing his head on one side, he was warbling, ore Yotundo, some
melodious ditty, with infinite complacency, and, to all appearance, to
the great delight of his auditory, when his eyes lighted on me,--he was
petrified in a moment, I seemed to have blasted him,----his warbling
ceased instantaneously, the colour faded from his cheeks, but there he
sat, with open mouth, and in the same attitude as if he still sung, and I
had suddenly become deaf, or as if he and his immediate compotators, and
the group of blackies beyond, had all been on the instant turned to stone
by a slap from one of their own John Canoes. I must have been in truth a
terrible spectacle; my skin was yellow, not as saffron, but as the skin
of a ripe lime; the white of my eyes, to use an Irishism, ditto; my mouth
and lips had festered and broke out, as we say in Scotland; my head was
bound round with a napkin--none of the cleanest, you may swear; my dress
was a pair of dirty duck trowsers, and my shirt, with the boat--cloak
that had been my only counterpane on board of the little vessel, hanging
from my shoulders.
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