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Rh out my fist, still full of bills! I couldn't open it, mind you! Jeff was laughing fit to bust, but it took three cops to keep the crowd from mauling me. "À l'eau;" said they; "à l'eau!" Meaning, I take it, to first give me a bath in the water-jump. That's the way with Frenchies; they love a crook, as long as he doesn't get nailed. But let him once get caught, and they want to tear him apart, like a shot wolf in the pack!

Well, sir, it was Cayenne for mine. Cayenne isn't in all ways like Palm Beach, and I didn't care for it much, but I perfected my French, the La Villette sort, and different from my early education in that tongue with Tante Fi-Fi. In the end I escaped and managed to get up to Demerara (George town, you know), where I joined the colony of peppers and became what they call a "Walla-baby." A Walla-baby is an escaped French convict who keeps alive by making a nasty mess of sorghum and chopped cocoanut and peddling it to the nigger piccaninnies at a total net profit of about five cents a day. "Voilà bébé Voilà, bébé!" says this merchant, and that's how he got the name.

It wasn't much of a job, even when business was brisk, for the son of R. F.—but there, never mind the name. My inherited financial talent kept me from being satisfied even when I made a coup and cleared as much as fifty cents a week, so I pulled out and stowed away on a Royal Mail ship for Trinidad, and landed there, black and blue. The following day I tried to get a billet on an American yacht. While the captain was calling me several different kinds of a beach-comber there came down the deck