36 THE INLAND PASSAGE. 



abstinence. For as fast as our man Charley brought 

 them to the surface and deposited them on the deck, 

 we opened them with a skill founded on some expe- 

 rience and more desire, and devoured them with 

 hearty gusto. 



We loaded up with oysters and then started once 

 more on our course, but the wind fell off and we 

 anchored in Stumpy Point Bay, some thirty miles to 

 the southward and on the main shore. At our last 

 stopping plac3 a sick man had come aboard for ad- 

 vice, and here we not only found two others, but were 

 also informed that their mother was at the point of 

 death. There seemed to be a sublime faith in these 

 people that all Northerners must know something of 

 medicine, as none of them had a suspicion of our 

 having a physician in the party. Indeed they came 

 for " a drawing of tea" as they called it, rather than 

 for any special medicine, for they appeared to consider 

 sickness the natural condition of man, as among 

 those terribly unhealthy swamps and low lands it 

 probably is. After that almost everywhere we went 

 we were asked for "a drawing of tea" for some 

 sick person. 



Their ailments were evidently only too well found- 

 ed, and as the people were clearly not a complaining 

 set, we were sorry that we had not brought more of 

 the coveted article with us. The whites of this coast 

 looked weazened, thin, yellow, and cadaverous, as if 

 they had a perpetual conflict with fever in which 

 they invariably got the worst of it. They had the 

 shadow of death in ttosir faces. In their motions 



