Page:Buried Caesars.djvu/214

 Now, all take warning from this 'ere song,

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Never drink whisky so divilish strong,

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

The narrator concludes: "The song ended on an ear-piercing shriek, tremendous emphasis on the next to the last line. When inquiry was made of the sailors as to where they learned the song, they stared solemnly at the questioner until one black-haired giant, in a red woollen shirt, hitched his trousers defiantly and answered: 'We never learned it nowhere, we allers knowed it!'".

That is obviously a hoax, with no particular intention to deceive, and it is also good fun. The stanzas are exceedingly clever regarded as a "rough, unstudied sailor's jingle," and the fellow who composed them knew what he was about. Allison's chanty is far too good to have been written by any but a very superior sort of sailor; but this newspaper-chanty might actually have been the work of a singing seaman. It is quite possible that the author of the newspaper article did not himself compose the chanty he quoted, that he heard it sung, someplace, and adopted and adapted it; but, granting that possibility, the suggestion that the chanty is an ancient one from which Stevenson drew his lines is only conceivable on the hypothesis that Lloyd Osbourne is in