g, dashed out upon the staircase. Up the stairs I ran: along
the corridor: and up a second staircase.

The sunshine broke around me. I was on the leads of the roof, and
Panama lay spread at my feet like a trodden garden. I listened: no
footsteps were following. Far away from the westward came the notes
of a bugle--faint, yet clear. In the northern suburbs the dogs were
baying. I listened again. I crept to the parapet of the roof and saw
the stained eastern window of the chapel a few yards below me, saw its
painted saints and martyrs, outlined in lead, dull against the noonday
glow. And from within came no sound at all.

D'ARFET'S VENGEANCE

_The Story is Told by Dom Bartholomew Perestrello, Governor of the
Island of Porto Santo_.

It was on the fifteenth day of August, 1428, and about six o'clock in
the morning, that while taking the air on the seaward side of my house
at Porto Santo, as my custom was after breaking fast, I caught sight
of a pinnace about two leagues distant, and making for the island.

I dare say it is commonly known how I came to the governance of Porto
Santo, to hold it and pass it on to my son Bartholomew; how I sailed
to it in the year 1420 in company with the two honourable captains
John Gonsalvez Zarco and Tristram Vaz; and what the compact was which
we made between us, whereby on reaching Porto Santo these two left me
behind and passed on to discover the greater island of Madeira. And
many can tell with greater or less certainty of our old pilot,
the Spaniard Morales, and how he learned of such an island in his
captivity on the Barbary coast. Of all this you shall hear, and
perhaps more accurately, when I come to my meeting with the
Englishman. But I shall tell first of the island itself, and what were
my hopes of it on the morning when I sighted his pinnace.

In the first warmth of discovering them we never doubted that
these were the Purple Islands of King Juba, the very Garden of the
Hesperides, found anew by us after so many hundreds of years; or that
we had aught to do but sit still in our governments and grow rich
while we feasted. But that was in the year 1420, and the eight years
between had made us more than eight years sadder. In the other island
the great yield of timber had quickly come to an end: for Count Zarco,
returning thither with wife and children in the month of May, 1421,
and purposing to build a city, had set fire to the woods behind the
fennel-fields on the