he had made a mistake, performed the agreeable task of counting the
gold a second time, but with the same result as before. After making
the allowance for the fifty dollars found in the captain's state-room,
the amount was one hundred dollars short. Mr. Ebenier had the impudence
to ask himself if this could be the miser's money, since it did not
hold out in the sum he had lost. But the bags were plainly marked, as
the fourth had been, "N. Fairfield," in the cramped handwriting of the
miser. Of course there could be no doubt in regard to the ownership of
the treasure, and Mr. Ebenier could not but wonder at the stupidity of
the thieves in hiding it in or under the old sail in the Hotel de
Poisson. But he did them the justice to conclude that it had only been
placed there for a short time, perhaps for but a few hours; at any
rate, their presence in the shanty indicated that it was to have been
removed during the night.

It had been removed during the night! The steward chuckled when he
thought of it, but his capacious intellect was agitated by a great
moral question. Thirty-eight hundred and fifty dollars was an immense
sum to a person in his station, who had never had even a hundred
dollars in his possession at one time. Honesty was a precious jewel,
but it was not possible for him to make thirty-eight hundred and fifty
dollars, at one stupendous haul, by being honest. He did not steal the
money. He did not rob the old man. If the steward had not suffered the
perils and discomforts of two broken heads, or rather one head broken
twice, the robbers, whoever they were, would doubtless have divided the
money between them, and the old man would never know what had become of
his cherished gold.

Mr. Ebenier asked himself if this was not a freak of fortune in his
favor; if the money was not a providential compensation for his
twice-broken head. Thirty-eight hundred and fifty dollars would be a
very handsome atonement for two such raps as he had received, and he
was Mammon-worshipper enough to feel willing that his head should be
pounded to a jelly at this rate, so long as the germ of his mighty
intellect was not extinguished.

The steward was a man of exquisite tastes, and was ambitious for social
recognition and distinction. In Paris a colored man was just as good
as, if not a little better than, a white man. His former master, in
Louisiana, had believed in Paris, and seeing with his eyes, he had been
fully converted to h