I.—­This is a pleasant sight, isn’t it?

Can Grande.—­It has a certain interest, as exhibiting the inborn ideal tendency of the human race;—­no tribe of people so wretched, so poor, or so infamous as to dispense with amusement, in some form or other.

Voice from below.—­Play up, Cook!  That’s but a slow jig ye’re fluting away at.

Can Grande.—­I went once to the Five Points of New York, with a police-officer and two philanthropists;—­our object was to investigate that lowest phase of social existence.——­

Bang, whang, go the wrestlers below, with loud shouts and laughter.  I give them one eye and ear,—­Can Grande has me by the other.

Can Grande.—­I went into one of their miserable dance-saloons.  I saw there the vilest of men and the vilest of women, meeting with the worst intentions; but even for this they had the fiddle, music and dancing.  Without this little crowning of something higher, their degradation would have been intolerable to themselves and to each other.——­

Here the man who gave the back in leap-frog suddenly went down in the middle of the leap, bringing with him the other, who, rolling on the deck, caught the traitor by the hair, and pommelled him to his heart’s content.  I ventured to laugh, and exclaim, “Did you see that?”

Can Grande.—­Yes; that is very common.—­At that dance of death, every wretched woman had such poor adornment as her circumstances allowed,—­a collar, a tawdry ribbon, a glaring false jewel, her very rags disposed with the greater decency of the finer sex,—­a little effort at beauty, a sense of it.  The good God puts it there;—­He does not allow the poorest, the lowest of his human children the thoughtless indifference of brutes.——­

And there was the beautiful tropical sky above, starry, soft, and velvet-deep,—­the placid waters all around, and at my side the man who is to speak no more in public, but whose words in private have still the old thrill, the old power to shake the heart and bring the good thoughts uppermost.  I put my hand in his, and we descended the companionway together and left the foolish sailors to their play.

But now, on the after-deck, the captain, much entreated, and in no wise unwilling, takes down his violin, and with pleasant touch gives us the dear old airs, “Home, Sweet Home,” “Annie Laurie,” and so on, and we accompany him with voices toned down by the quiet of the scene around.  He plays, too, with a musing look, the merry tune to which his little daughter dances, in the English dancing-school, hundreds of leagues away.  Good-night, at last, and make the most of it.  Coolness and quiet on the water to-night, and heat and mosquitoes, howling of dogs and chattering of negroes tomorrow night, in Havana.