_Author._ “What did you do in New York, Peter?”
_Peter._ “We laid by and unrigged for winter, and the captain sent to Troy and had his family brought down to the city, and I lived in his family that winter as servant; and I had fine times tu, for he was a noble man, and lived as independent as a prince, in Broadway, nigh where the Astor House stands. I had a fine winter of it, and come spring he hired the Carnapkin, one of the biggest and best ships in port, and all rigged. We weighed anchor for Bristol, and this was rare sport for me, for we was a goin’ to see old John Bull.
“When we’d been out about seven or eight days, we was overhauled by a tremendous storm from the north-east; and it grew worse and worse, and about midnight she lay on her beam ends for some time, and we expected to go to pieces; and the second mate sounded the hold and found four feet water in her, and that started the hair. We got the pumps a goin’ and pretty soon the captain hollers out, ‘she rights,’ and glad enough we was; and the carpenter found her leak, and makes all tight, and by next day all was clear as a bell. The captain found himself off of his course over two hundred miles, and so he hauls on agin; and in about twenty days we made sight of the white coast of old England, and there we was becalmed for two days, and didn’t stir a mile.
“The captain says, ‘now boys, you may go and fish till we git a breeze.’ Well, we hadn’t been out long afore we fell foul of a shark, and the first thing he knowed he had the harpoon in him, and we got him aboard, and then we calculated on a great hurrah, and sure enough we did have a _melancholy_ one tu. The captain says, ‘now let’s have his liver cooked,’ for you see a shark’s liver is a great dish at sea. And so I goes to work and cuts him open, and what do you think I found there?
“Why the first thing I found was the _hand of a human person_, and on the middle finger was a gold ring, and on it ’twas wrote who she was in Spanish characters. The captain stands by and says, ‘dig carefully a leetle furder and see what you find.’ So on I dug with my butcher-knife, and up comes a gold chain; and I pulled away and out come a gold locket, and it had a lock of hair in it, and a name on it. We hunted along and found human bones, and nails of fingers partly _dissolved_.