the water as tempting bait for sharks, and the tropical sun blazing down on him and reflected back at him from the iron ship's side and from the oily ocean beneath. Then he carols forth his amorous lay, and shouts, "Bill, pass that paint-pot" in his jolliest tones. It is very rarely that a black seaman is treated to a paint-pot; all they are allowed to do is to knock off the old stuff, which they do in the nerveless way the African does most handicraft. The greatest dissipation of the black hands department consists in being allowed to knock the old stuff off the steam-pipe covers, donkey, and funnel. This is a delicious occupation, because, firstly, you can usually sit while doing it, and secondly, you can make a deafening din and sing to it.
The other habit and the more widely known is the animistic view your seaman takes of Nature. Every article that is to a landsman an article and nothing more, is to him an individual with a will and mind of his own. I myself believe there is something in it. I feel sure that a certain hawser on board the ——— had a weird influence on the minds of all men who associated with it. It was used at Liverpool coming out of dock, but owing to the absence of harbours on the Coast it was not required again until it tied our ocean liner up to a tree stump at Boma, on the Congo. Nevertheless it didn't suit that hawser's views to be down below in the run and see nothing of life. It insisted on remaining on deck, and the officers gave in to it and said "Well, perhaps it was better so, it would rot if it went down below," so some days it abode on the quarter-deck, some days on the main, and now and again it would condescend to lie on the fo'castle, head in the sun. It had too its varying moods of tidiness, now neat and -
