ttracted the boy's attention from the notorious
woman at he head of the table, and held him interested during all the
meal.

"Pretty Hulda, I salute you! Patty, _buenos dias!_ I hope I see you
well, friend!"--the last to Levin.

As he took up his knife and fork Levin observed a ring, with a pure
white diamond in it, flash upon the Captain's hand. He was a blue-eyed
man, with a blush and a lisp at once, as of one shy, but at times he
would look straight and bold at some one of the group, and then he
seemed to lose his delicacy and become coarse and cold. One such look he
gave at Hulda, who bowed her eyes before it, and looked at him but
little again.

To Levin this man had the greatest fascination, partly from his
extraordinary dress--like costumes Levin had seen at the theatre in
Baltimore, where the pirates on the stage wore a jacket and open shirt
and belt similar in cut though not in material--and partly from his
countenance, in which was something very familiar to the boy, though he
racked his memory in vain for the time and place. The stranger was
hardly more than forty to forty-five years of age, but the mistress of
the house treated him with all the blandishments of a husband.

"Dear Captain! pore honey!" she said; "to have his beautiful yaller hair
tored out by the nigger hawk! Honey, he fell onto me, and I thought a
bull had butted me in the stummick."

"He broke no limbs, Patty," the captain lisped, feeding himself in a
dainty way--and Levin observed that his fork was silver, and his knife
was a clasp-knife with a silver handle, that he had taken from his
pocket--"_Chis! chis!_ if he had snapped my arm, the caravan must have
gone without me to-night. I am sore, though, for Senor was a valiant
wrestler."

"He'll git his pay, honey, when they sot him to work in Georgey an' flog
him right smart, an' we spend the price of him fur punch. He, he! lovey
lad!"

"I took this from him to-day when I searched him carefully," the captain
said, handing Patty Cannon a piece of silver coin.

The woman, though she looked to be little more than fifty years of age,
drew out spectacles of silver from an old leather case, and putting them
on, spelled out the coin:

"George--three--eighteen--eighteen hunderd-and-fifteen!"

She threw up her head so quickly that the spectacles dropped from her
nose, and Hulda caught them, and then Mrs. Cannon turned on Hulda with a
ferocious expression and snatched the spectacles from he