ens! to think of anything so wonderful happening as this! Boy!
boy! dost thou know who thou art? Thou art my own brother's son. His
name was Oliver Chillingsworth, and he was my partner in business,
and thou art his son." Then he ran out into the entryway, shouting and
calling for his wife and daughter to come.

So Tom Chist--or Thomas Chillingsworth, as he now was to be called--did
stay to supper, after all.

This is the story, and I hope you may like it. For Tom Chist became
rich and great, as was to be supposed, and he married his pretty cousin
Theodosia (who had been named for his own mother, drowned in the Bristol
Merchant).

He did not forget his friends, but had Parson Jones brought to New York
to live.

As to Molly and Matt Abrahamson, they both enjoyed a pension of ten
pounds a year for as long as they lived; for now that all was well with
him, Tom bore no grudge against the old fisherman for all the drubbings
he had suffered.

The treasure box was brought on to New York, and if Tom Chist did not
get all the money there was in it (as Parson Jones had opined he would)
he got at least a good big lump of it.

And it is my belief that those log books did more to get Captain Kidd
arrested in Boston town and hanged in London than anything else that was
brought up against him.

Chapter V. JACK BALLISTER'S FORTUNES

I

WE, of these times, protected as we are by the laws and by the number
of people about us, can hardly comprehend such a life as that of the
American colonies in the early part of the eighteenth century, when
it was possible for a pirate like Capt. Teach, known as Blackbeard, to
exist, and for the governor and the secretary of the province in which
he lived perhaps to share his plunder, and to shelter and to protect him
against the law.

At that time the American colonists were in general a rough, rugged
people, knowing nothing of the finer things of life. They lived mostly
in little settlements, separated by long distances from one another,
so that they could neither make nor enforce laws to protect themselves.
Each man or little group of men had to depend upon his or their own
strength to keep what belonged to them, and to prevent fierce men or
groups of men from seizing what did not belong to them.

It is the natural disposition of everyone to get all that he can. Little
children, for instance, always try to take away from others that which
they want, and to keep it for their own.