but the reader
remembers--his new schooner, which he had dignified by the name of
yacht, much to the amusement of a few acquaintances, had been easily
beaten by a trim stranger, that ploughed its way to windward as if it
had been a knife eating into the teeth of the gale. He had followed this
new craft to harbor and found her to be a Herreshoff model. That night,
for the colonel's schooner was really an able and fast one, the
disappointed man was sadder than when he saw his only friend, his
father, die. He was proud of his schooner. He had cruised in her from
Baltimore to the St. John's river, and had never been so disgracefully
out-pointed and outfooted by any boat of her size before.

It was at this time that he fell into a revery that lasted a month. It
was the longest month in his life, the only one he had ever spent upon
the mainland. People pronounced him "daft," decidedly cracked, but
"harmless, you know." His tall figure flitted from the lobby of the
Charleston Hotel to the great cotton wharves, and then back again. At
last he awoke, and this was the outcome of his supposed aberration.

"I don't care if it costs me my last cent, I'll have the fastest boat in
the world, and no one shall beat me again, by gum!"

To make a long story short, he sold to an eager syndicate of English
capitalists his island for an asparagus farm, reserving for himself the
odd acres of marsh, his camp house and bay with its two moorings. On
this sale he realized a hundred thousand cash down. He then turned his
father's savings, fifty thousand dollars' worth of London consols, into
ready money. He now had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. With this
he and his boat disappeared. No note was taken of his absence either on
his former property or in Charleston, the only other place that really
knew him, so frequent were his vagaries, so infrequent his presence.

Let us follow the Colonel in his unostentatious wanderings. He first
sailed with his son and his two trusty men direct to Washington city.
He took in the sights of the Capital for a few weeks, and then, leaving
his boat behind, pushed on by train to New York, that wonderful
metropolis that obliterates or worships men with an idea. He took
lodgings with his son in a modest boarding-house, and there met a
Swedish sailor, a man who had been captain of a steam yacht during the
summer, and now happened to be out of employment. Nautical people do not
take a long time to become acquai