Separating several yards, they levelled
their heads like two telescopes on stands, and ran butt at each other
like ram--goats, and quite as odoriferous, making the welkin ring again
as their flint--hard skulls cracked together. Finding each other
invulnerable in this direction, they closed, and began scrambling and
biting and kicking, and tumbling over and over in the sand; while the
skipper and I stood by cheering them on, and nearly suffocated with
laughter. They never once struck with their closed fists I noticed; so
they were not much hurt. It was great cry and little wool; and at
length they got tired, and hauled off by mutual consent, finishing off
as usual with an appeal to us--"beg one feepenny, massa!"
At six o'clock we drove to Mr Pepperpot Wagtail's. The party was a
bachelor's one, and, when we walked up the front steps, there was our
host in person, standing to receive us at the door; while, on each side
of him, there were five or six of his visitors, all sitting with their
legs cocked up, their feet resting on a sort of surbase, above which the
jealousies, or movable blinds of the piazza, were fixed.
I was introduced to the whole party seriatim--and as each of the cock
legs dropped his trams, he started up, caught hold of my hand, and wrung
it as if I had been his dearest and oldest friend.
Were I to designate Jamaica as a community, I would call it a
handshaking people. I have often laughed heartily upon seeing two
cronies meeting in the streets of Kingston after a temporary separation;
when about pistol--shot asunder, both would begin to tug and rug at the
right--hand glove, but it is frequently a mighty serious affair in that
hissing hot climate to get the gauntlet off; they approach,--one, a
smart urbane little man, who would not disgrace St James's Street, being
more kiln--dried and less moist in his corporeals than his country
friend, has contrived to extract his paw, and holds it out in act to
shake.
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