"It was very dark, and there's no sayin' at this date what happened."

"Yes there is," said the Puddin', "for I had my eye on the whole
affair, and it's my belief that if he hadn't been so round you'd
have never rolled him off the iceberg, for you was both singing
out, `Yo heave Ho' for half-an-hour, an' him trying to hold on
to Bill's beard."

"In the haste of the moment," said Bill, "he may have got a bit
of a shove, for the ice bein' slippy, and us bein' justly
enraged, and him bein' as round as a barrel, he may, as I said,
have been too fat to save himself from rollin' off the iceberg.
The point, however, is immaterial to our story, which concerns this
Puddin'; and this Puddin'," said Bill, patting him on the basin,
"was the very Puddin' that Curry and Rice invented on the
iceberg."

"He must have been a very clever cook," said Bunyip.

"He was, poor feller, he was," said Bill, greatly affected.
"For plum duff or Irish stoo there wasn't his equal in the land.
But enough of these sad subjects. Pausin' only to explain that
me an' Sam got off the iceberg on a homeward bound chicken coop,
landed on Tierra del Fuego, walked to Valparaiso, and so got home,
I will proceed to enliven the occasion with `The Ballad of the
Bo'sun's Bride'."

And without more ado, Bill, who had one of those beef-and-thunder
voices, roared out--