significantly on my
leftside--to his huge delight. He flashes his white teeth and wags his
head from side to side with inarticulate enjoyment of the allusion. For
who knows? He may be right. In so mysterious a world the smallest cause
may lead up to the most august results and there is nothing too
wonderful to happen.

EPILOGUE BY THE EDITOR

_It remains for me, as sponsor for the foregoing narrative, reluctantly
to add a second postscript to that of its author, bringing the fortunes
of himself and his friends a little nearer to the present year of grace.
Not that anything untoward has happened to any of them. Their lives are
still lived happily in the sun, and their treasure is still
safe--somewhere carefully out of the sun. But neither their lives nor
their treasure are where my friend's postscript left them. They are,
indeed, very much nearer New York than at that writing._

_As a matter of fact, after King Alcinoues had played but a short time at
being the Count of Monte Cristo in his underground palace, it gradually
was borne in upon his essentially common-sense mind, as upon the minds
of Calypso and her husband, that their secret was known to too many for
its absolute safety. Kindly coloured people indeed, and a very friendly
"Secretary to the British Treasury" ... still, there was no knowing,
and, on all accounts, they gradually came to the unromantic conclusion
that the safe deposit vaults of New York were more reliable than
limestone caverns filled with the sound of sea. This conclusion explains
the presence of my friend and his Lady of the Doubloons in the box of
the Punch and Judy Theatre that, to me, eventful evening._

_Since then, I myself have made a pilgrimage to all the places that play
a part in this romance. I have crawled my way through those caves in
which my friend came so near to leaving his bones, looked into those
vaults once glittering with pieces of eight and all that other
undivulged treasure-trove, wedged myself as far as I dared into that
slit in the rocks, looking out like a narrow window on the sea._

_All those places are real; any one, with a mind to, can find them; but,
should any one care to undertake the pilgrimage, he will note, as I did,
that those baronial halls of Edward Teach--for a while the playground of
King Alcinoues--are rapidly being reclaimed by the savage wilderness,
fiercely swallowed minute by minute by the fanged and serpentine
vegetation--which, after a