Plastered up to the middle like the rest of the party, besides splashes over face and hat, I could get no dirtier than I was already.  I got without compunction into a canoe some three feet wide; and was shoved by three Negroes down a long winding ditch of mingled mud, water, and mangrove-roots.  To keep one’s self and one’s luggage from falling out during the journey was no easy matter; at one moment, indeed, it threatened to become impossible.  For where the mangroves opened on the sea, the creek itself turned sharply northward along shore, leaving (as usual) a bed of mud between it and the sea some quarter of a mile broad; across which we had to pass as a short cut to the boat, which lay far out.  The difficulty was, of course, to get the canoe out of the creek up the steep mud-bank.  To that end she was turned on her side, with me on board.  I could just manage, by jamming my luggage under my knees, and myself against the two gunwales, to keep in, holding on chiefly by my heels and the back of my neck.  But it befell, that in the very agony of the steepest slope, when the Negroes (who worked like really good fellows) were nigh waist-deep in mud, my eye fell, for the first time in my life, on a party of Calling Crabs, who had been down to the water to fish, and were now scuttling up to their burrows among the mangrove-roots; and at the sight of the pairs of long-stalked eyes, standing upright like a pair of opera-glasses, and the long single arms which each brandished, with frightful menaces, as of infuriated Nelsons, I burst into such a fit of laughter that I nearly fell out into the mud.  The Negroes thought for the instant that the ‘buccra parson’ had gone mad:  but when I pointed with my head (I dare not move a finger) to the crabs, off they went in a true Negro guffaw, which, when once begun, goes on and on, like thunder echoing round the mountains, and can no more stop itself than a Blackcap’s song.  So all the way across the mud the jolly fellows, working meanwhile like horses, laughed for the mere pleasure of laughing; and when we got to the boat the Negro in charge of her saw us laughing, and laughed too for company, without waiting to hear the joke; and as two of them took the canoe home, we could hear them laughing still in the distance, till the lonely loathsome place rang again.  I plead guilty to having given the men, as payment, not only for their work but for their jollity, just twice what they asked, which, after all, was very little.

But what are Calling Crabs?  I must ask the reader to conceive a moderate-sized crab, the front of whose carapace is very broad and almost straight, with a channel along it, in which lie, right and left, his two eyes, each on a footstalk half as long as the breadth of his body; so that the crab, when at rest, carries his eyes as epaulettes, and peeps out at the joint of each shoulder.  But when business is to be done, the eye-stalks jump bolt upright side