Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

CHRISTMAS ON MAJUBA STATION.

BY RICHARD BARRY.

December on the Majuba coast, and the day had been the hottest of the month, as the log-book entry showed.

It was a few minutes past sundown, and the awnings that had covered the decks of the old steam-frigate Sumter were being taken in to allow a freer passage for any air that might begin to stir with the nightfall.

The barefooted sailors trod gingerly about, carefully avoiding the metal-work on the hatch combings and the soft blotches of pitch that had bubbled up through the deck seams. The only sounds were the chattering of a large monkey that was swinging himself to and fro in the heat-slackened shrouds, and the discordant squawking of some tame parrots on the forecastle.

A group of officers lolled against the after-rail, and three or four youngsters, a little apart from them, had just finished a whispered conversation. But for some minutes there had not been a loud word spoken throughout the ship. There was one thought present in the minds and hearts of all, from the Captain, ill and half delirious with fever below in his close sweltering cabin, to Midshipman Bobby Seymour, who had had a lump in his throat for the past twenty-four hours—one thought, over and over—home, home, home.

It was the early evening of the night before Christmas. A sagging wind-sail, that hung down the forward hatchway like a huge empty trouser leg, swayed a little, and the movement caught the junior Lieutenant's eye.

"The land breeze! Feel it?" he said, lifting his hand as if to enforce silence.

Warm, and almost fetid with an indescribable odor, a breath had crept softly across the water from the low-lying African coast—a breath redolent of swamps, of strange unhealthy products of the overheated earth, suggestive of fever that burned into the bones.

"I don't like it," said Bobby Seymour, wriggling his small shoulders. He spoke in a half whisper. "I wish I was at Irvington with the river all iced up, the sleigh-bells jingling-jangling everywhere, and—"

"Oh, I say, quit, please, won't you?" interrupted the boy at his elbow. "It's hard enough to stand things as they are. What wouldn't we all give—" Then he shut his lips firmly without finishing his sentence. "Hear that surf!" he added, after a moment's silence.

Borne on the slight air from the eastward came a deep sound like the booming of a thousand giant drums.

"It doesn't look like any landing to-morrow," remarked Midshipman Seymour, wisely.

Just then the thin musical notes of a concertina drifted out from the forecastle.

"'Be it never so humble, there's no place like home,'"

chanted a voice.

"They have it there too," said Bobby Seymour to himself. "Why shouldn't they?"

But the song died away almost as soon as it had begun. In fact, it had been more like a deep-chested musical sigh than anything else.

"I wonder if we couldn't get the Kroomen to sing something jolly for us to-night?" suggested one of the larger midshipmen.

"I think the old man is too ill to stand much celebrating just now," spoke up another. "But I say, Remson, let's see if one of us can't get ashore to-morrow and get something fresh to eat. I'm sick of this old hooker, anyhow. Might as well be docked in Portsmouth, for all the good we're doing here."

This was fact. Watching for slave-traders under such restrictive orders from the government at Washington as precluded the faintest possibility of making a capture was far from exciting, and, besides, the goings on at home had produced a feeling of uneasiness on shipboard, for this was the troublous winter of '60-1.

It was little wonder that things were doleful on board the old Sumter this particular Christmas eve, and so it passed like the evening of any other day.

But Bobby Seymour, when he awakened the next morning, gazed up at the huge deck beams of the steerage, and suddenly remembered something.

He