they set sail joyfully, homeward bound
for the shores of the misty North Sea, the shallow German Ocean. Here
they had a number of retreats and strongholds. There was Helgoland, the
mysterious island; Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the river Elbe; Buxtehude,
notoriously known from a very peculiar ferocious breed of dogs; Norse
Loch on the coast of Holstein, and numerous other locker, or inlets,
hard to find, harder to enter when found and hardest to pronounce. In
the course of time these rovers were visited by saintly Christian
missionaries and, like all other Saxon tribes, they accepted the light
of the Christian Gospel. They saw the error of their way and eschewed
their vocation of piracy and devoted their energies to commerce and the
spreading of the Gospel of Christ.

Piously they decorated the sails of their crafts and blazoned their war
shields with the sign of the cross. They kidnapped holy priests (for
otherwise they came not), and taking them aboard their ships, they
sailed to their several ports. Then they forced the unwilling Fathers
to unite them in holy wedlock to the maidens of their choice. To many
havens they sailed, and in every one they had an only wife. They made
their priests inscribe texts from the holy Gospel on pieces of
parchment made from the skin of hogs, and instead of robbing people, as
of yore, they paid with the word of Holy Scripture for the booty they
levied. This, they said, was infinitely more precious than any worldly
dross. All hail to the memory of my gallant maternal ancestor, who,
when surfeited with the caresses of his Fifine of Normandy, flew to the
arms of Mercedes of Andalusia. Next, perhaps, he appeared in Greenland,
blubbering with an Esquimau heiress. Anon, you might have found him in
Columbia in the tolls of a princely Pocahontas. In Mexico he ate the
ardent chile from the tender hand of his Guadalupita, and later on he
was on time at a five o'clock family tea party in Japan, or he might
have kotowed pidgin-love to a trusting maid in a China town of fair
Cathay. In Africa--oh, horror!--here I draw the veil, for in my mind's
eye I behold a burly negro (yes, sah!) staring at me out of fishy, blue
eyes. It is said of these gallant rovers of the seas that they were
subject to a peculiar malady when on shore. It caused them to stagger
and swagger, use violent language, and deport themselves not unlike
people who are seized with mal de mer, or sickness of the sea. When
attacked by thi