nging in holsters like
bandoleers; he stuck lighted matches under his hat, which, appearing
on each side of his face, and his eyes naturally looking fierce and
wild, made him altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form
an idea of a Fury from hell to look more frightful."

The night before the day of the action in which he was killed he sat
up drinking with some congenial company until broad daylight. One of
them asked him if his poor young wife knew where his treasure was
hidden. "No," says Blackbeard; "nobody but the devil and I knows where
it is, and the longest liver shall have all."

As for that poor young wife of his, the life that he and his rum-crazy
shipmates led her was too terrible to be told.

For a time Blackbeard worked at his trade down on the Spanish Main,
gathering, in the few years he was there, a very neat little fortune
in the booty captured from sundry vessels; but by and by he took it
into his head to try his luck along the coast of the Carolinas; so off
he sailed to the northward, with quite a respectable little fleet,
consisting of his own vessel and two captured sloops. From that time
he was actively engaged in the making of American history in his small
way.

He first appeared off the bar of Charleston Harbor, to the no small
excitement of the worthy town of that ilk, and there he lay for five
or six days, blockading the port, and stopping incoming and outgoing
vessels at his pleasure, so that, for the time, the commerce of the
province was entirely paralyzed. All the vessels so stopped he held as
prizes, and all the crews and passengers (among the latter of whom was
more than one provincial worthy of the day) he retained as though they
were prisoners of war.

And it was a mightily awkward thing for the good folk of Charleston to
behold day after day a black flag with its white skull and crossbones
fluttering at the fore of the pirate captain's craft, over across the
level stretch of green salt marshes; and it was mightily unpleasant,
too, to know that this or that prominent citizen was crowded down with
the other prisoners under the hatches.

One morning Captain Blackbeard finds that his stock of medicine is
low. "Tut!" says he, "we'll turn no hair gray for that." So up he
calls the bold Captain Richards, the commander of his consort the
_Revenge_ sloop, and bids him take Mr. Marks (one of his prisoners),
and go up to Charleston and get the medicine. There was no task that
sui