ess admirable dwelling than the hamlet
where he saw the day and grew to manhood. Here was a consolatory thought
for one who was himself a failure.

Yes, I declare the word came in my mind; and all the while, in another
partition of the brain, I was glowing and singing for my new-found
opulence. The pile of gold--four thousand two hundred and fifty double
eagles, seventeen thousand ugly sovereigns, twenty-one thousand two
hundred and fifty Napoleons--danced, and rang and ran molten, and lit up
life with their effulgence, in the eye of fancy. Here were all things
made plain to me: Paradise--Paris, I mean--regained, Carthew protected,
Jim restored, the creditors ...

"The creditors!" I repeated, and sank back benumbed. It was all theirs
to the last farthing: my grandfather had died too soon to save me.

I must have somewhere a rare vein of decision. In that revolutionary
moment I found myself prepared for all extremes except the one: ready to
do anything, or to go anywhere, so long as I might save my money. At the
worst, there was flight, flight to some of those blest countries where
the serpent extradition has not yet entered in.

On no condition is extradition
Allowed in Callao!

--the old lawless words haunted me; and I saw myself hugging my gold in
the company of such men as had once made and sung them, in the rude and
bloody wharf-side drinking-shops of Chili and Peru. The run of my
ill-luck, the breach of my old friendship, this bubble fortune flaunted
for a moment in my eyes and snatched again, had made me desperate and
(in the expressive vulgarism) ugly. To drink vile spirits among vile
companions by the flare of a pine-torch; to go burthened with my furtive
treasure in a belt; to fight for it knife in hand, rolling on a clay
floor; to flee perpetually in fresh ships and to be chased through the
sea from isle to isle, seemed, in my then frame of mind, a welcome
series of events.

That was for the worst; but it began to dawn slowly on my mind that
there was yet a possible better. Once escaped, once safe in Callao, I
might approach my creditors with a good grace; and, properly handled by
a cunning agent, it was just possible they might accept some easy
composition. The hope recalled me to the bankruptcy. It was strange, I
reflected; often as I had questioned Jim, he had never obliged me with
an answer. In his haste for news about the wreck, my own no less
legitimate curiosity had gone disappointed. H