“‘Yis, and if you’d come across a good shark, you’d catched a nice fish wouldn’t you?’
“And when he spoke ’bout that, it scart me, for I begun to realize my danger, and I begun to be afeard when ’twas tu late, and I trembled jist like a leaf.
“But I’ll hurry on. We made the New York light after a long v’yge, and was kept on quarantine a good while, and on the mornin’ of the fourth of July, when the bells was a ringin’, and the boats was a flyin’ through the bay, and the guns from the Battery and Hoboken was a soundin’ along the bosom of the Hudson, all independence; and we landed and jumped ashore, and I think I never in all my life felt sich a kind of a gush of joy rush through all my soul, as I did when I heard them bells ring, and them guns roar; and this free nigger jumped ashore and celebrated independence as loud as any body.
“The captain paid us all off, and as I left him, I said I’d never go to sea agin, but that didn’t make it so; for I hadn’t been ashore a month, afore I was off agin with Captain George Thomson. Then I had five hundred dollars—three hundred Spanish mill dollars, and two hundred on the Manhattan Bank, and I had as good a wardrobe of clothes, both citizen’s and sailor’s as any other feller. Captain Thomson finds out I’d got this money, and says he, ‘you better not be a lugging your money round from port, let it out and git the interest on it;’ and so he showed me a rich man, Mr. Leacraft, that wanted it, and he gin me two notes of two hundred and fifty dollars, for one and two years, and I counted out my money; and we sailed for the West Indies. Well, we got there and took in a heavy cargo of groceries, and ’bout for home. But ’twas late in the season, and we had cold blusterin’ weather, and finally it grew so cold the rain froze on the riggin’; and the captain says, ‘we can’t make New York,’ and the mate says, ‘we can; and so we sailed on till we made the New York light, and we was all covered with ice; and the captain says, ‘boys we shall git stove to pieces, for we can’t manage our riggin’, and we must put back.’ So we did, into a warmer climate, and in two or three days the riggin’ grew limber, and the ice all dropped off, and it grew warmer and warmer, till at last we was in a region like our Ingen summer.