been projected before the receipt of
it, and at the worst it would enable him to call quits with Vigoureux.

He reflected further that these roving Commissions to report were often
no index of Government policy, but were simply appointed to shelve,
while professing to consider a question which the Government found
awkward.

So, luncheon over, he sat down and wrote a letter thanking the
Secretary for his communication, and very politely offering to do all
in his power to make the Commissioners' visit "to these
out-of-the-world Islands" a pleasant one.

Having copied the letter and read it over with no little approval, the
Lord Proprietor dealt briefly with the rest of his correspondence;
consulted his pocket-diary, looked at his watch, and, finding that he
had an hour to spare before granting an interview to Eli Tregarthen,
stepped out upon the terrace, where Abe Jenkins was cutting back the
geraniums that had well-nigh ceased to flower.

"But is it necessary?" asked the Lord Proprietor. "Here, in the very
mouth of the Gulf Stream ... and last winter we escaped with nothing
worse than two degrees of frost."

"Last winter and this winter be two different things, sir," protested
Abe, gently but firmly. "Last winter, sir--as you may have taken
notice--we had next to no berries 'pon the holly; and no seals, nor yet
no mermaids."

"Seals? Mermaids?" Sir Caesar echoed.

"Which I've always heard it said, sir," Old Abe went on, with the air
of one carefully, even elaborately, deferring to superior ignorance,
"as how than seals you can have no surer sign of hard weather. Of
mermaids I says nothing, except that with such-like creatures about you
may count 'pon something out of the common."

"Since," said the Lord Proprietor, "there are no such things as
mermaids, we will confine ourselves to seals.... I had no idea that
seals--er--frequented our shores."

"No more they don't, unless summat extr'ord'ny has taken the weather.
But I've heard tell of a season when, for weeks together, you could
count up two or three score together baskin' on the beaches to the
north of the Island here. Sam Leggo can tell you all about it"--Abe
jerked a thumb in the direction of North Inniscaw Farm. "He and his
father used to hunt them, one time, along with Phil Cara of St. Hugh's.
You know where the old adit goes into the cliff under Carn Coppa? Well,
they tell me that if you follow the adit for fifty yards you come to a
kind of pit that b