ough I will
admit that for the first two days I found my comfortable brass bedstead
a resting-place much more to my liking than a seat at the dinner-table,
although I duly turned up there for the sake of appearances. During
this period of seclusion I thought deeply of the latest attempt of my
enemies to secure the casket, and it caused me great uneasiness. I
could not imagine how they knew that I should go to my lawyers for it.

Ethel made a brave show, but it was quite the third day out from
Liverpool before I saw her smile as I wished to see her smile--without
a mental reservation, in fact.

St. Nivel was really the only perfectly unconcerned member of our
party, and it was through his persevering attendances on the promenade
deck, that I became acquainted with a young lady who will figure
largely in these pages, although she in reality was by no means of
commanding stature, but one of those charming petite persons whose
mission in life appears to be to exemplify what extraordinarily choice
pieces of human goods can be made up in small parcels.

It was on the fourth day out that I became acquainted with Dolores
d'Alta. While I had been lying disconsolately on my cot, St. Nivel had
been improving the shining hour by looking after Miss Dolores, who had
taken up her position, during the first few days of her trial, in a
sheltered position on the promenade deck, in preference to her "stuffy
cabin," as she called her state room.

It had been the pleasure, and had become the duty--a self-imposed
one--of St. Nivel to see that she was properly wrapped up.

She did not object to smoke either, having, as she stated, been brought
up in an atmosphere of smoke at home. Therefore Jack smoked his cigar.

Had I not known that St. Nivel's inclinations were apparently fixed in
the direction of bachelorhood, I should have thought he had fallen in
love; but I discovered later that he had, to use an expression of his
own, "simply taken on another pal." He found her a congenial person in
whose society to smoke cigars. But if he had fallen in love, certainly
he would have had a most excellent excuse for doing so.

A daintier little specimen of Southern beauty it would have been
difficult to imagine than this little Aquazilian aristocrat. To
describe her in a few words, she was a beautiful woman in miniature;
she was the most perfectly symmetrical little piece of womanhood that I
had ever set eyes upon.

A perfectly clear, cr