uffins and swashbucklers
gathered about him, all talking very loud, and drinking healths in raw
rum as though it were sugared water.

And what a fine figure our buccaneer had grown, to be sure! How
different from the poor, humble clerk upon the sugar wharf! What a
deal of gold braid! What a fine, silver-hilted Spanish sword! What a
gay velvet sling, hung with three silver-mounted pistols! If Master
Harry's mind had not been made up before, to be sure such a spectacle
of glory would have determined it.

This figure of war our hero asked to step aside with him, and when
they had come into a corner, proposed to the other what he intended,
and that he had a mind to enlist as a gentleman adventurer upon this
expedition. Upon this our rogue of a buccaneer captain burst out
a-laughing, and fetching Master Harry a great thump upon the back,
swore roundly that he would make a man of him, and that it was a pity
to make a parson out of so good a piece of stuff.

Nor was Captain Morgan less good than his word, for when the _Good
Samaritan_ set sail with a favoring wind for the island of Jamaica,
Master Harry found himself established as one of the adventurers
aboard.

II

Could you but have seen the town of Port Royal as it appeared in the
year 1665 you would have beheld a sight very well worth while looking
upon. There were no fine houses at that time, and no great counting
houses built of brick, such as you may find nowadays, but a crowd of
board and wattled huts huddled along the streets, and all so gay with
flags and bits of color that Vanity Fair itself could not have been
gayer. To this place came all the pirates and buccaneers that infested
those parts, and men shouted and swore and gambled, and poured out
money like water, and then maybe wound up their merrymaking by dying
of fever. For the sky in these torrid latitudes is all full of clouds
overhead, and as hot as any blanket, and when the sun shone forth it
streamed down upon the smoking sands so that the houses were ovens and
the streets were furnaces; so it was little wonder that men died like
rats in a hole. But little they appeared to care for that; so that
everywhere you might behold a multitude of painted women and Jews and
merchants and pirates, gaudy with red scarfs and gold braid and all
sorts of odds and ends of foolish finery, all fighting and gambling
and bartering for that ill-gotten treasure of the be-robbed Spaniard.

Here, arriving, Captain Morga