r," answered Tom; "you never know."

CHAPTER II

_In Which I Catch a Glimpse of a Different Kind of Treasure._

I had, as I have said, made up my mind to start on the homeward trip
early the following morning, but something happened that very evening to
change my plans. I had dropped into the little settlement's one store,
to buy some tobacco, the only kind that Charlie Webster--who carried his
British loyalty into the smallest concerns of life, declared fit to
smoke--some English plug of uncommon strength, not to say ferocity, a
real manly tobacco such as one might imagine the favourite chew of
pirates and smugglers.

I stayed chatting with the storekeeper--a lean, astute-looking
Englishman, with the un-English name of Sweeney--who made a pretty good
thing of selling his motley merchandise to the poor natives, on the good
old business principle of supplying goods of the poorest possible
quality at the highest possible prices. He was said to hold a mortgage
on the lives of half the population, by letting them have goods on
credit against their prospective wages from sponging trips, he himself
being the owner of three or four sponging sloops, and so doubly insured
against loss. His low-ceilinged, black-beamed store, dimly lit with
kerosene lamps, was a wilderness of the most unattractive merchandise
the mind of man can conceive, lying in heaps on trestles, hanging from
the rafters, and cluttering up every available inch of space, so that
narrow lanes only were left among dangling tinware, coils of rope,
coarse bedding, barrels in which very unappetising pork lay steeping in
brine, other barrels overflowing with grimy looking "grits" and sailors'
biscuits, drums of kerosene and turpentine, cans of paint, jostling
clusters of bananas, strings of onions, dried fish, canned meats, loaves
of coarse bread, tea and coffee, and other simple groceries.

Two rough planks laid on barrels made the counter, up to which from time
to time rather worn-looking, spiritless negro women and girls would come
to make their purchases, and then shuffle off again in their listless
way. Once in a while a sturdy negro would drop in for tobacco, with a
more independent, well-fed air. The Englishman served them all with a
certain contemptuous indifference in which one somehow felt the presence
of the whip-hand.

While he was thus attending a little group of such customers, I had
wandered toward the back of the store, curiously examinin