. There were
several negroes, grinning and passive spectators of this scene. I
understood it in a moment. So did my gentlemen in the tarpaulin hats.
They were off to me in a less time than a top-gallant breeze takes to
travel aft from the flying jib-boom, supposing the ship to be at single
anchor.

I took out my pocket-book, wrote down their names (most likely purser's
ones), and ordered them on board their vessel directly. They obeyed, or
rather appeared to do so, and departed, casting many "a lingering,
longing look behind," leaving me the triumphant master of the field--the
paladin, who had rescued the fair, for which I received much clapping of
hands from the dark visages, and an intense look of gratitude from the
fair, pale creature, whom I had released from the very equivocal
rudeness of her admirers. The thanks from Monsieur Manuel, the father,
were neither silent nor few, and when he found that I could converse in
French, he exhausted the vocabulary of that copious language of all its
expressions of gratitude. I hardly could perceive that I had rendered
any service at all; I had struck no blows and had run no risk; I had
merely spoken, and obedience followed. However, as I could not stem the
torrent of his gratitude, I determined to divert its course, by yielding
to his urgent entreaties to accompany him to his house, and recruit
myself after my perilous and heroic deed.

We were soon seated in the coolest room of his mansion, and every West
Indian luxury was quickly produced to tempt my palate. In fifteen
minutes he had acquainted me with his parentage, his possessions, and
his history. He assured me, with gesticulations, and a few oaths, that
he was not at all connected with the brigands that inhabited the town
below--that he despised them, knew them all to be pirates, or abettors
of pirates, revolutionists, and republicans--that he was at heart, yea,
in heart and soul, a royalist, and devotedly attached to the _vieux
regime_; that the estate he now cultivated he had inherited from his
father, who had been one of the few spared in the revolt of the blacks;
that he had been educated at Paris, but, for the last five-and-thirty
years, had hardly been off his own grounds--that he had no wife, and,
indeed, never married, had no family at all, excepting Josephine, who
sat beside him, who was his very dear and only child.

He did not add, "a slave, and the daughter of a slave."

I now looked upon her ste