vacious young mariner's
curiosity, he went ashore to sample the "Holland," for which the Dutch
are so famous, to stroll across the two hundred and ninety-odd bridges,
and to take an observation of the pretty girls that loomed up in sedate
but ample old Amsterdam. There, in a saloon where the gin was a most
divine Hippocrene, and the cigars fragrant, Oliver beheld a tight little
craft, and straightway ran up his flag as a salute. She was a brunette,
with as pretty a form as the sun had ever kissed. Her dark, dark eyes
were large, lustrous and superb. Oliver shares Lord Byron's weakness for
handsome eyes. He's very fond of them. The name of the Amsterdam
divinity was Marie. He resembled the same illustrious poet in his
predilection for the name of Mary or Marie. He thought there was a
sweetness in it. And so he sank into the quicksands of Eros, right over
his tarry toplights, and, nothing loth, Marie accompanied him in the
Avernian descent. Every morning that he lay in the Dutch port our
mariner squared his yard-arms and trimmed himself for bringing-to
alongside Marie. Every night the tics were getting tauter, and when he
proposed that she should cross with him to England there was no pitching
on her part worth speaking of. And so they voyaged to Albion and to
several ports in Gaul; and there was no lee-way in their love, but still
the tics were getting tauter, evidencing strong probabilities of a life
cruise together.

A year or two after, both Oliver and Marie were in New York, and,
according to the affidavit of Captain Hazard's mother, Marie called upon
the matron and told her "that she had been living with her son Oliver;
that she had first met him in Amsterdam, and had traveled with him as
his wife in England and in France, and that he had brought her to
America." Marie assured the old lady that she loved him dearly, that she
had been faithful and true to him ever since their intimacy, and hence
she was anxious that Oliver should marry her and make her an honest
woman in the eyes of the law and of the world. Whereupon, the mother
persuaded the son to marry the pretty, young, gazelle-eyed girl, who
could speak American and write like a born citizen.

Oliver's own account of this momentous event, as chronicled in his
affidavit, is not materially different. He affirms that he first met
Marie in a liquor store in Amsterdam, "which she was in the habit of
frequenting. At this time she was of loose character;" she "lived