earned. The people of Lewes respected him greatly, and the boys of
the town were bidden to emulate his steady business ways and habit of
thrift. He was, too, a man of public spirit. At his own cost and charge
he renewed the town pump; and he presented the church--he was a very
regular churchgoer when on shore--with a large bell of singularly sweet
tone that had come into his possession after a casual encounter with a
Cuban-bound galleon off the Bahama Banks.

And yet when at last my great-great-great-uncle, in the fulness of his
years and virtues, was gathered to his fathers, and the sweet-toned
Spanish bell tolled his requiem, everybody was very much surprised to
find that of the fine fortune accumulated during his successful business
career nothing worth speaking of could be found. The house that he owned
in Lewes, the handsome furniture that it contained, and a sea-chest in
which were some odds and ends of silverware (of a Spanish make) and some
few pieces-of-eight and doubloons, constituted the whole of his visible
wealth.

For my great-great-great-aunt, with a family of five sons and seven
daughters (including three sets of twins) all under eleven years of age,
the outlook was a sorry one. She was puzzled, too, to think what had
gone with the great fortune which certainly had existed, and so was
everybody else. The explanation that finally was adopted was that my
great-great-great-uncle, in accordance with well established pirate
usage, had buried his treasure somewhere, and had taken the secret of
its burial-place with him to another and a better world. Probability was
given to this conjecture by the fact that he had died in something of a
hurry. He had been brought ashore by his men after an unexpected (and
by him uninvited) encounter with a King's ship off the capes of the
Delaware. One of his legs was shot off, and his head was pretty well
laid open by a desperate cutlass slash. He already was in a raging
fever, and although the best medical advice in Lewes was procured, he
died that very night. As he lay dying his talk was wild and incoherent;
but at the very last, as my great-great-great-aunt well remembered,
he suddenly grew calm, straightened himself in the bed, and said, with
great earnestness: "Sheer up the plank midway--"

That was all. He did not live to finish the sentence. At the moment,
my great-great-great-aunt believed the words to be nothing more than a
delirious use of a professional phrase;