Ah---- Yes; well, I was telling you about the
poker.
"It was--let me see--nearly thirteen years ago,
in Lima. I told you Peru was a delightful country
to live in; but it's not quite so nice for people that
happen to be at low water, as I was. I had been
down in the Argentine, and then in Chili, tramping
the country and starving, mostly; and had
come up from Valparaiso as odd-man on a cattle-boat.
I couldn't get any work in Lima itself, so I
went down to the docks,--they're at Callao, you
know,--to try there. Well of course in all those
shipping-ports there are low quarters where the
sea-faring people congregate; and after some time
I got taken on as servant in one of the gambling
hells there. I had to do the cooking and billiard-marking,
and fetch drink for the sailors and their
women, and all that sort of thing. Not very
pleasant work; still I was glad to get it; there was
at least food and the sight of human faces and
sound of human tongues--of a kind. You may
think that was no advantage; but I had just been
down with yellow fever, alone in the outhouse of a
wretched half-caste shanty, and the thing had
given me the horrors.
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