room. Two of us seized it by the head and two by the tail to take it back to its prison. As we were carrying it along it drew itself up and our four heads collided together with a crash; then it straightened itself out, and we shot off violently towards the four corners of the room; it required the united efforts of six men to remove that snake to his own domicile. This adventure shows what a guilty conscience will effect; and it was the more amusing because the naval hero had, not with the best taste, been loudly proclaiming that he was almost a teetotaller, that all military officers were drunkards, and that nobody ever died in West Africa except from the effect of ardent spirits. He went away rather early next morning without waiting to say "good-bye" to anybody.
I wonder what has become of the jovial, open-handed, and open-hearted naval officers that one reads about in works of fiction, and who continually interlard their conversation with nautical expressions; one never meets any of this description now-a-days, in fact quite the contrary; and I am half inclined to believe that they never were more than creatures of the imagination, but if ever they did exist the species is now extinct. The life that naval officers lead shut up in a floating tank on the West Coast of Africa is
