niece to fly aboard the Coquette; for, though a man who has always kept
his feelings in his own command, as the safest manner of managing
particular interests, yet I am not to learn that rash youth is often
guilty of folly. I am now equally at a loss with yourself, to know what
has become of her, since here she is not."

"Hold!" eagerly interrupted Ludlow. "A boat left your wharf, for the city,
in the earlier hours of the morning. Is it not possible that she may have
taken a passage in it?"

"It is not possible. I have reasons to know--in short, Sir, she is not
there."

"Then is the unfortunate--the lovely--the indiscreet girl for ever lost to
herself and us!" exclaimed the young sailor, actually groaning under his
mental agony. "Rash, mercenary man! to what an act of madness has this
thirst of gold driven one so fair--would I could say, so pure and so
innocent!"

But while the distress of the lover was thus violent, and caused him to be
so little measured in his terms of reproach, the uncle of the fair
offender appeared to be lost in surprise. Though la belle Barberie had so
well preserved the decorum and reserve of her sex, as to leave even her
suitors in doubt of the way her inclinations tended, the watchful Alder
man had long suspected that the more ardent, open, and manly commander of
the Coquette was likely to triumph over one so cold in exterior, and so
cautious in his advances, as the Patroon of Kinderhook. When, therefore,
it became apparent Alida had disappeared, he quite naturally inferred that
she had taken the simplest manner of defeating all his plans for favoring
the suit of the latter, by throwing herself, at once, into the arms of the
young sailor. The laws of the colonies offered few obstacles to the
legality of their union; and when Ludlow appeared that morning, he firmly
believed that he beheld one, who, if he were not so already, was
inevitably soon to become his nephew. But the suffering of the
disappointed youth could not be counterfeited; and, prevented from
adhering to his first opinion, the perplexed Alderman seemed utterly at a
loss to conjecture what could have become of his niece. Wonder, rather
than pain, possessed him; and when he suffered his ample chin to repose on
the finger and thumb of one hand, it was with the air of a man that
revolved, in his mind, all the plausible points of some knotty question.

"Holes and corners!" he muttered, after a long silence; "the wilful minx
canno