ssassins!" said I, gulping, for I was heartily ashamed of
my terror, and determined to show "cause why" in the plural.

"Come in here, and have a glass of something," said he, turning into a
little cabaret, with whose penetralia he seemed not unfamiliar. "You 're
all safe here," said he, as he closed the door of a little room. "Let's
hear all about it, though I half guess the story already."

I had no difficulty in perceiving, from my companion's manner, that
he believed some sudden shock had shaken my faculties, and that my
intellects were for the time deranged; nor was it very easy for me to
assume sufficient calm to disabuse him of his error, and assert my own
perfect coherency. "You have been out for a lark," said he, laughingly.
"I see it all. You have been at one of those tea-gardens and got into a
row with some stout Fleming. All the young English go through that sort
of thing. Ain't I right?"

"Never more mistaken in your life, Captain. My conduct since I landed
would not discredit a canon of St. Paul's. In fact, all my habits,
my tastes, my instincts, are averse to every sort of junketing. I am
essentially retiring, sensitive, And, if you will, over-fastidious in my
choice of associates. My story is simply this." My reader will readily
excuse my repeating what is already known to him. It is enough if I say
that the captain, although anything rather than mirthful, held his
hand several times over his face, and once laughed out loudly and
boisterously.

"You don't say it was Christy Jopplyn, do you?" said he, at last. "You
don't tell me it was Jopplyn?"

"The fellow called himself Jopplyn, but I know nothing of him beyond
that."

"Why, he's mad jealous about that wife of his; that little woman with
the corkscrew curls, and the scorbutic face, that came over with us.
Oh! you did not see her aboard, you went below at once, I remember; but
there was, she, in her black ugly, and her old crape shawl--"

"In mourning?"

"Yes. Always in mourning. She never wears anything else, though Christy
goes about in colors, and not particular as to the tint, either."

There came a cold perspiration over me as I heard these words, and
perceived that my proffer of devotion had been addressed to a married
woman, and the wife of the "most jealous man in Europe."

"And who is this Jopplyn?" asked I, haughtily, and in all the proud
confidence of my present security.

"He's a railway contractor,--a shrewd sort of fellow, wit