of its liquidability; of his beautiful mother whose spirit was as determined as that of the old Royalist, and whose marriage to the rising young councillor from the North had broken the old man s heart, though it had proved longer in the breaking than one would have supposed; and so on down through the long sequence of his ill-lucked wanderings since.
The visions passed, and, though he was not at all given to vulgar curiosity, it was quite natural to follow those directions so chaffingly tossed as a farewell by Queer Hat. He traversed the two turns to the right, and three to the left, up the hill, as verbally diagrammed, found the white wash, the old skiff, and its cargo of petunias. However, over its creaking gate loomed something not in the prospectus,—a female most rigidly boned and coiffured, and most precisely pursed of mouth.
A few cues he caught from her conversation,—"Sally," and "kidnapped,"—"or run away to sea," then a more ominous "judgment of God." So he made his way to the beach.
The sky was overcast, but a half-mile away a fire was burning. He followed its pennons, to discover a group around it,—a tall fellow, pallid of feature, and dressed in contrasting black, of the sort, the observing stranger decided, an American would at once label "smooth"; a trio of rascals that most certainly deserved the epithet "precious"; a smartly-dressed youth, a little the worse for whiskey—and a girl.
Pictorially she would have made an excellent Carmen, he thought, with her swarthiness set in a crimson dress, but she
