to their own imaginings, there will be fresh
trouble in the Satpuras.

THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA

All supplies very bad and dear, and there are no facilities for even the
smallest repairs.--Sailing Directions.

Her nationality was British, but you will not find her house-flag in
the list of our mercantile marine. She was a nine-hundred-ton, iron,
schooner-rigged, screw cargo-boat, differing externally in no way from
any other tramp of the sea. But it is with steamers as it is with men.
There are those who will for a consideration sail extremely close to the
wind; and, in the present state of a fallen world, such people and such
steamers have their use. From the hour that the Aglaia first entered
the Clyde--new, shiny, and innocent, with a quart of cheap champagne
trickling down her cut-water--Fate and her owner, who was also her
captain, decreed that she should deal with embarrassed crowned heads,
fleeing Presidents, financiers of over-extended ability, women to whom
change of air was imperative, and the lesser law-breaking Powers. Her
career led her sometimes into the Admiralty Courts, where the sworn
statements of her skipper filled his brethren with envy. The mariner
cannot tell or act a lie in the face of the sea, or mis-lead a tempest;
but, as lawyers have discovered, he makes up for chances withheld when
he returns to shore, an affidavit in either hand.

The Aglaia figured with distinction in the great Mackinaw salvage-case.
It was her first slip from virtue, and she learned how to change her
name, but not her heart, and to run across the sea. As the Guiding Light
she was very badly wanted in a South American port for the little matter
of entering harbour at full speed, colliding with a coal-hulk and the
State's only man-of-war, just as that man-of-war was going to coal. She
put to sea without explanations, though three forts fired at her for
half an hour. As the Julia M'Gregor she had been concerned in picking up
from a raft certain gentlemen who should have stayed in Noumea, but
who preferred making themselves vastly unpleasant to authority in quite
another quarter of the world; and as the Shah-in-Shah she had been
overtaken on the high seas, indecently full of munitions of war, by the
cruiser of an agitated Power at issue with its neighbour. That time she
was very nearly sunk, and her riddled hull gave eminent lawyers of two
countries great profit. After a season she reappeared as the Martin
Hunt