One day, after I had been "boot-topping" the sloop with a composition of coal-tar and other stuff, and while I was taking my dinner, with the luxury of blackberry jam, I heard a commotion, and then a yell and a stampede, as the children ran away yelling: "The captain is eating coal-tar! The captain is eating coal-tar!" But they soon found out that this same "coal-tar" was very good to eat, and that I had brought a quantity of it.

One day when I was spreading a sea-biscuit thick with it for a wide-awake youngster, I heard them whisper, "Chut-chut!" meaning that a shark had bitten my hand, which they observed was lame.

Thenceforth they regarded me as a hero, and I had not fingers enough for the little bright-eyed tots that wanted to cling to them and follow me about.

Before this, when I held out my hand and said, "Come!" they would shy off for the nearest house, and say, "Dingin" ("It's cold"), or "Ujan" ("It's going to rain").

But it was now accepted that I was not the returned spirit of the lost black, and I had plenty of friends about the island, rain or shine.
One day after this, when I tried to haul the sloop and found her fast in the sand, the children all clapped their hands and cried that a _kpeting_ (crab) was holding her by the keel; and little Ophelia, ten or twelve years of age, wrote in the _Spray's_ log-book: A hundred men with might and main On the windlass hove, yeo ho! The cable only came in twain; The ship she would not go; For, child, to tell the strangest thing, The keel was held by a great kpeting.
This being so or not, it was decided that the Mohammedan priest, Sama the Emim, for a pot of jam, should ask Mohammed to bless the voyage and make the crab let go the sloop's keel, which it did, if it had hold, and she floated on the very next tide.
On the 22d of July arrived H.M.S.