_Apropos_ of snakes,--a naval officer had rather an amusing adventure with one at Tower Hill. He had come ashore, from a gunboat lying in the harbour, to dine at mess; and, as is usually the case, had suddenly discovered, after the third or fourth rubber, about 11 p.m., that he could not get off to his ship that night, and must trespass upon somebody’s kindness for a bed. He was assisted to a room, and the lights were being put out in the mess when we heard a series of wild shouts up stairs, and then a noise as of some heavy body thumping and banging down the steps. We ran out into the passage, and discovered the naval man lying curled up, half undressed, at the bottom of the stair-case; so we lifted him up and asked what was the matter. He appeared very much frightened, and gasped out:--
“Oh, Lord: I’ve got them at last--Oh, send for a doctor will you. I’ll never touch another drop of that cursed ship’s rum, if I get over this.”
“Got? I’ve got the jumps--that’s what I’ve got.”
“I tell you I’m not. I could have sworn I saw a snake in my bed just now, and that’s one of the first signs.”
He was so eager to see a doctor that we took him to one, and then went up to examine his room. True enough there was a snake, coiled up in the blanket on his bed. It was a python, which had escaped from a cage in which several were confined in an adjoining room. Two of us seized it by the head and two by the tail to take it back to its prison. As we were carrying it along it drew itself up and our four heads collided together with a crash; then it straightened itself out, and we shot off violently towards the four corners of the room; it required the united efforts of six men to remove that snake to his own domicile. This adventure shows what a guilty conscience will effect; and it was the more amusing because the naval hero had, not with the best taste, been loudly proclaiming that he was almost a teetotaller, that all military officers were drunkards, and that nobody ever died in West Africa except from the effect of ardent spirits. He went away rather early next morning without waiting to say “good-bye” to anybody.
I wonder what has become of the jovial, open-handed, and open-hearted naval officers that one reads about in works of fiction, and who continually interlard their conversation with nautical expressions; one never meets any of this description now-a-days, in fact quite the contrary; and I am half inclined to believe that they never were more than creatures of the imagination, but if ever they did exist the species is now extinct. The life that naval officers lead shut up in a floating tank on the West Coast of Africa is horrible; sometimes they do not set foot on shore for months together, but lie day after day, rolling fearfully, off a few mud huts and a grove of cocoanut palms. They have hardly any work to do, and, as but few of them have any resources of amusement or occupation, they as a natural consequence quarrel amongst themselves; and in almost every gunboat one finds the five or six officers divided into two or three cliques, each of which will have nothing to say to either of the others, except on official matters. This sort of thing is rather unpleasant for any stranger who may happen to be on board. First of all one will come up and enter into conversation with you, during which he is sure to say:--