g the Centipedes. Suspicion rested for a while on several persons--on
the soldiers at the fort; on a crazy fellow, known about town as
"Bottle-Nose"; and at last on Sailor Ben.

"Shiver my timbers!" cries that deeply injured individual. "Do you
suppose, sir, as I have lived to sixty year, an' ain't got no more sense
than to go for to blaze away at my own upper riggin'? It doesn't stand
to reason."

It certainly did not seem probable that Mr. Watson would maliciously
knock over his own chimney, and Lawyer Hackett, who had the case in
hand, 'bowed himself out of the Admiral's cabin convinced that the right
man had not been discovered.

People living by the sea are always more or less superstitious. Stories
of spectre ships and mysterious beacons, that lure vessels out of their
course and wreck them on unknown reefs, were among the stock legends of
Rivermouth; and not a few people in the town were ready to attribute the
firing of those guns to some supernatural agency. The Oldest Inhabitant
remembered that when he was a boy a dim-looking sort of schooner hove
to in the offing one foggy afternoon, fired off a single gun that didn't
make any report, and then crumbled to nothing, spar, mast, and hulk,
like a piece of burnt paper.

The authorities, however, were of the opinion that human hands had
something to do with the explosions, and they resorted to deep-laid
stratagems to get hold of the said hands. One of their traps came very
near catching us. They artfully caused an old brass fieldpiece to be
left on a wharf near the scene of our late operations. Nothing in the
world but the lack of money to buy powder saved us from falling into
the clutches of the two watchmen who lay secreted for a week in a
neighboring sail-loft.

It was many a day before the midnight bombardment ceased to be the
town-talk. The trick was so audacious and on so grand a scale that
nobody thought for an instant of connecting us lads with it.
Suspicion at length grew weary of lighting on the wrong person, and
as conjecture--like the physicians in the epitaph--was in vain, the
Rivermouthians gave up the idea of finding out who had astonished them.

They never did find out, and never will, unless they read this veracious
history. If the selectmen are still disposed to punish the malefactors,
I can supply Lawyer Hackett with evidence enough to convict Pepper
Whitcomb, Phil Adams, Charley Marden, and the other honorable members of
the Centipede Club