The meal, for reasons which have been stated, was not a success, but payment had to be rendered all the same.  He sang with noise, and made antics such as experience had taught him would be acceptable; and the audience, to whom a concert of this kind was a rarity, howled to him to go on.  There was no escape.  He had to sing till he could sing no more.  It was far on into the night when a couple of native tom-tom players rescued him.  The musical appetites of the village had been whetted rather than appeased, and as no more could be got out of this wandering minstrel, why then they were quite ready to listen to local instruments and melody.

Dancing commenced, and the heat and the noise grew, and presently Kettle managed to slip away and walk out through the yam and manioc gardens, and the banana groves, to the uproarious beach beyond.  He threw himself wearily down on the warm white sand, and when the great rollers swept in and crashed into noisy bellowing surf, the spindrift from it drove on him, and refreshed him luxuriously.  It was almost worth going through all he had suffered to enjoy the pleasures of that greeting.

For long-enough he filled his eye on the creaming fringes of the surf, and then he glanced over it at the purple plain of ocean which lay level and unruffled beyond.  A great African moon glowed above it in the night, and the lonely vastness of it all gratified him like the presence of a friend.  “You are a decent old puddle,” he murmured to himself, “though I say it that’s got precious little from you beyond mud and slashing.  It’s good to be back in reach of the stink of you again.”

He lay on where he was deep into the night, revelling in the companionship of the sea, till the many-colored land-crabs began to regard him as mere jetsam.  He was not consciously thinking.  He was letting his mind rest in an easy torpor; but from time to time he let his eyes range through the purple dark with a seaman’s mechanical watchfulness.  The noise of the tom-toms and the dancing from the village behind him had died away, and nothing but the sounds from the bush, and the din of the surf, remained to show that the world was alive.  The moon, too, had been smothered by a cloud bank, and night lay huddled close round him, with a texture like black velvet.

Then, with a jump he was on his feet, and trembling violently.  Another old friend was in his neighborhood—­a steamer.  Her masthead light had just twinkled into view.  He got up and began walking nervously toward her along the hard, white sands.  He saw her first in the northwest, coming from some port in the Bight of Biafra probably, and the odds were she was heading south along the Coast.