inner's
ready, and I'm sure the horse is not more hungry than some of us."

"None more so than Mr. Scarlett an' myself," said Sartoris, "----we've
not had a sit-down meal since we were wrecked."

CHAPTER IV.

Rachel Varnhagen.

He sat on a wool-bale in his "store," amid bags of sugar, chests of tea,
boxes of tobacco, octaves of spirits, coils of fencing-wire, bales of
hops, rolls of carpets and floor-cloth, piles of factory-made clothes,
and a miscellaneous collection of merchandise.

Old Varnhagen was a general merchant who, with equal complacency, would
sell a cask of whisky, or purchase the entire wool-clip of a "run" as
big as an English county. Raising his eyes from a keg of nails, he
glanced lovingly round upon his abundant stock in trade; rubbed his fat
hands together; chuckled; placed one great hand on his capacious stomach
to support himself as his laughter vibrated through his ponderous body,
and then he said, "'Tear me, 'tear me, it all com' to this. 'Tear,
'tear, how it make me laff. It jus' com' to this: the Maoris have got
his cargo. All Mr. Cookenden's scheming to beat me gifs me the pull over
him. 'Tear me, it make me ill with laffing. If I believed in a God, I
should say Jehovah haf after all turn his face from the Gentile, and
fight for his Chosen People. The cargo is outside the port: a breath of
wind, and it is strewn along the shore. Now, that's what I call an
intervention of Providence."

He got off the wool-bale much in the manner in which a big seal clumsily
takes the water, and walked up and down his store; hands in pockets, hat
on the back of his head, and a complacent smile overspreading his face.
As he paused at the end of the long alleyway, formed by his piles of
merchandise, and turned again to traverse the length of the warehouse,
he struck an attitude of contemplation.

"Ah! but the insurance?" he exclaimed. As he stood, with bent head
and grave looks, he was the typical Jew of the Ghetto; crafty, timid,
watchful, cynical, cruel; his grizzled hair, close-clipped, crisp, and
curly; his face pensive, and yellow as a lemon.

"But he will haf seen to that: I gif him that much credit. But in the
meantime he is without his goods, and the money won't be paid for
months. That gif me a six-months' pull over him."

The old smile came back, and he began to pace the store once more.

There was a rippling laugh at the further end of the building where
Varnhagen's private office, pa