"When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul wouldn't speak to us we knew we'd struck bed rock.
"We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop and a ladies' and gents' restaurant in a street called the _calle de los_Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints.When our credit played out there, Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of _noblesse oblige_, married Chica.This kept us in rice and fried plantain for a month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning sadly and earnestly for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down from the stone age, and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver.That night we signed an engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid banana fancier of the place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles out of town.We had to do it or be reduced to sea water and broken doses of feed and slumber.
"Now, speaking of Liverpool Sam, I don't malign or inexculpate him to you any more than I would to his face.But in my opinion, when an Englishman gets as low as he can he's got to dodge so that the dregs of other nations don't drop ballast on him out of their balloons.And if he's a Liverpool Englishman, why, fire-damp is what he's got to look out for.Being a natural American, that's my personal view.But Liverpool and me had much in common.We were without decorous clothes or ways and means of exist ence; and, as the saying goes, misery certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.