To begin with, a colossal and highly varnished Cherokee, once the figure-head of a West Indiaman, stood sentry by the gate and hung forward over the road, to the discomfiture of unwarned and absent-minded bagmen.

The path to the door was guarded by a low fence of split-bamboo baskets that had once contained sugar from Batavia; a coffee bag from the wreck of a Dutch barque served for door-mat; a rum-cask with a history caught rain-water from the eaves; and a lapdog's pagoda--a dainty affair, striped in scarlet and yellow, the jetsom of some passenger ship--had been deftly adapted by Old Zeb, and stood in line with three straw bee-skips under the eastern wall.
The next day but one after Christmas dawned deliciously in Porthlooe, bright with virginal sunshine, and made tender by the breath of the Gulf Stream.

Uncle Issy, passing up the road at nine o'clock, halted by the Cherokee to pass a word with its proprietor, who presented the very antipodes of a bird's-eye view, as he knocked about the crumbling clods with his visgy at the top of the slope.
"Mornin', Old Zeb; how be 'ee, this dellicate day ?" "Brave, thankee, Uncle." "An' how's Coden Rachel ?" "She's charmin', thankee." "Comely weather, comely weather; the gulls be comin' back down the coombe, I see." "I be jealous about its lastin'; for 'tis over-rathe for the time o' year.

Terrible topsy-turvy the seasons begin to run, in my old age.
Here's May in Janewarry; an' 'gainst May, comes th' east wind breakin' the ships o' Tarshish." "Now, what an instructive chap you be to convarse with, I do declare! Darned if I didn' stand here two minnits, gazin' up at the seat o' your small-clothes, tryin' to think 'pon what I wanted to say; for I'd a notion that I wanted to speak, cruel bad, but cudn' lay hand on't.
So at last I takes heart an' says 'Mornin', I says, beginnin' i' that very common way an' hopin' 'twould come.

An' round you whips wi' 'ships o' Tarshish' pon your tongue; an' henceforth 'tis all Q's an' A's, like a cattykism." "Well, now you say so, I _did_ notice, when I turned round, that you was lookin' no better than a fool, so to speak.