Come on the sloop John B.
    My grandfather and me,
    Round Nassau town we did roam;
      Drinking all night, ve got in a fight,
    Ve feel so break-up, ve vant to go home.

        Chorus
    So h’ist up the John B. sails,
      See how the mainsail set,
    Send for the captain—­shore, let us go home,
    Let me go home, let me go home,
    I feel so break-up, I vant to go home.

    The first mate he got drunk,
    Break up the people trunk,
      Constable come aboard, take him away;
    Mr. John—­stone, leave us alone,
    I feel so break-up, I vant to go home.

        Chorus
    So h’ist up the John B. sails, etc., etc.

Nassau looked very pretty in the morning sunlight, with its pink and white houses nestling among palm trees and the masts of its sponging schooners, and soon we were abreast of the picturesque low-lying fort, Fort Montague, that Major Bruce, nearly two hundred years ago, had had such a time building as a protection against pirates entering from the east end of the harbour.  It looked like a veritable piece of the past, and set the imagination dreaming of those old days of Spanish galleons and the black flag, and brought my thoughts eagerly back to the object of my trip, those doubloons and pieces of eight that lay in glittering heaps somewhere out in those island wildernesses.

We were passing cays of jagged cinder-coloured rock covered with low bushes and occasional palms, very savage and impenetrable.  Miles of such ferocious vegetation separated me from the spot where my treasure was lying.  Certainly it was tough-looking stuff to fight one’s way through; but those sumptuous words of Henry P. Tobias’s narrative kept on making a glorious glitter in my mind:  “The first is a sum of one million and one half dollars....  The other is a sum of one million dollars....  The first pod was taken from a Spanish merchant and it is in Spanish silver dollars.  The other on Short Shrift Island is in different kinds of money, taken from different ships of different nations ... it is all good money.”

In fact I found to my surprise that I had the haunting thing by heart, as though it had been a piece of poetry; and over and over again it kept on going through my head.

Then Tom came up with my breakfast.  The old fellow stood by to serve me as I ate, with a pathetic touch of the old slavery days in his deferential, half-fatherly manner, dropping a quaint remark every now and again; as, when drawing my attention to the sun bursting through the clouds, he said, “The poor man’s blanket is coming out, sah”—­phrases in which there seemed a whole world of pathos to me.