ain
began casting me odd, uncomfortable looks, as though he wished himself
well out of the entertainment. Indeed, poor John Paul's perturbation
amused me more than the gentleman's anecdotes. To be ill at ease is
discouraging to any one, but it was peculiarly fatal with the captain.
This arch-aristocrat dazzled him. When he attempted to follow in the
same vein he would get lost. And his really considerable learning
counted for nothing. He reached the height of his mortification when the
slim gentleman dropped his eyelids and began to yawn. I was wickedly
delighted. He could not have been better met. Another such encounter,
and I would warrant the captain's illusions concerning the gentry to go
up in smoke. Then he might come to some notion of his own true powers.
As for me, I enjoyed the supper which our host had insisted upon our
partaking, drank his wine, and paid him very little attention.

"May I make so bold as to ask, sir, whether you are a patron of
literature?" said the captain, at length.

"A very poor patron, my dear man," was the answer. "Merely a humble
worshipper at the shrine. And I might say that I partake of its benefits
as much as a gentleman may. And yet," he added, with a laugh and a
cough, "those silly newspapers and magazines insist on calling me a
literary man."

"And now that you have indulged in a question, and the claret is coming
on," said he, "perhaps you will tell me something of yourself, Mr.
Carvel, and of your friend, Captain Paul. And how you come to be so far
from home." And he settled himself comfortably to listen, as a man who
has bought his right to an opera box.

Here was my chance. And I resolved that if I did not further enlighten
John Paul, it would be no fault of mine.

"Sir," I replied, in as dry a monotone as I could assume, "I was
kidnapped by the connivance of some unscrupulous persons in my colony,
who had designs upon my grandfather's fortune. I was taken abroad in a
slaver and carried down to the Caribbean seas, when I soon discovered
that the captain and his crew were nothing less than pirates. For one
day all hands got into a beastly state of drunkenness, and the captain
raised the skull and cross-bones, which he had handy in his chest. I was
forced to climb the main rigging in order to escape being hacked to
pieces."

He sat bolt upright, those little eyebrows of his gone up full half an
inch, and he raised his thin hands with an air of incredulity. John Paul
was