scene before me.  The position of the river was marked out by a semicircle of some fifty or sixty fires, before which dark and ill-defined figures were ever and anon flitting like phantoms; while, in the midst, the funnel of the steam-boat loomed tall and black above the veil of smoke that hung around—­like some dark and horrid object Of heathen idolatry surrounded by its sacrificial fires.  The sounds that met my ear, however, dispelled this somewhat fanciful idea; for in the stillness of the night voices grow distinct, while forms are indebted to the imagination for filling up their outlines.

The native passengers, who had remained, silent and dull, in a constrained position during the whole of the day, felt a load taken off their spirits as soon as they set foot on dry land; and in a trice the silence that had hitherto reigned was broken by a very Babel of tongues, among which could be distinguished the guttural jargon of the Scindian, the bastard dialect of Mahratti, of the Hindoo from the Deccan, and the ungrammatical patois of Hindostani, which—­although, when exclusively used, it marked out the Mussulman—­was yet the lingua franca of the whole party; but amidst the unceasing torrent of words, little could be distinguished, save when the ear was saluted with an outburst of nature’s universal and unvaried language in the shape of a light-hearted laugh.  By and by, my attention became directed, by an occasional shout of merriment, to a group of Seedies clustered round a fire near me.  Negroes in this country are much the same as in other parts of the World—­a happy, easily-contented race, forgetful of the past, and careless of the future.  After keeping up their noisy confabulation for some time, they removed to a level spot close to where I was lying:  one of them squatted down on the ground, and commenced singing to the music of a sort of tambourine, that he beat with the flat of his hand; and the others at once formed a circle, and commenced a rude dance, which had probably been brought by themselves or their fathers from the shores of Eastern Africa.  The air was at first low and monotonous, the time seeming to be more studied than any variation of the tune; but after some minutes a few notes in a higher key were occasionally introduced, giving the music a strangely wild and melancholy character.  The dance consisted principally of low jumps, each foot being alternately advanced in strict time with the music.  Sometimes the dancers joined hands; again they would pass into one another’s places, until they had made the circuit of the ring; and every now and then, in going through these movements, they would leap completely round, apparently without an effort, but as a natural consequence of the momentum produced by the celerity of their motions, and the weight of their huge bodies.  The whole affair was gone through in a serious and business-like manner, unusual in the negro.  How long I watched them I cannot say; but it seemed to