to show there was no man in Auvergne by that name, and what were they to
understand by that?

I told them I didn't know--it was past me. And it cert'nly was. But they
knew what to make of it, they said. There were people in Auvergne doing
this illegal business under false names. And I had used a false name,
and to try to tell the honorable court that I did not know the name of
the man in Saint Pierre who gave me the rum, nor the man I was bringing
it to--why, I knew very well who gave me the rum, and I knew who I was
bringing it to, and if the truth were known, I knew a lot more about the
rum-smuggling traffic. And they were going to put a stop to it.

And they laid a fine of twenty-five hundred dollars against my vessel.
Maybe you might think that a pretty heavy fine, but that's nothing.
Almost any little local magistrate down that way can soak an American
skipper or owner for almost any amount and get away with it. And how's
that? Well, we pay two or three dollars a barrel to Newfoundland
fishermen for herring. Before we went down here the St. John's merchants
used to pay them about fifty cents a barrel, and it's the St. John's
merchants who have all the money and came pretty near running
Newfoundland.

Well, when my little local magistrate fines me twenty-five hundred
dollars I said I wouldn't pay it, that I'd stir things up at Washington,
and so on, but they only laughed at me, and put her up for sale.

Now I'd 've bid her in myself if I'd had the money, but I only had a
couple of hundred dollars in cash for running expenses with me. All my
Newfoundland friends down that way were poor people--fishermen. If
'twas home we could 'a' raised plenty of money on her, but I was in
Newfoundland, not Gloucester, and they rushed the thing through.

Well, the _Aurora_ was bid in for just the amount of the fine, and that
was a shame, the vessel she was, and she was bid in by a man nobody
seemed to know. I went to the man who bid her in and told him the whole
story, of what the vessel meant to me, of how I came to bring the rum
over, and asked him would he give me the chance to communicate with some
business men in Gloucester and buy her back, but he only laughs at me,
and laughs in a way to make me think I was a child.

And in one way I was sort of a child, then, but I didn't begin to
realize how much of a child till I heard a voice giving orders to make
sail on the _Aurora_. A coast steamer had just come in, and from her