mpenetrable, abominable--a realm of Tories and rapparees. On the sloop
itself was scarce a man whose hands were free from blood. He, Augustin,
mild-mannered as any smuggler on the coast, had spent his life between
fleeing and fighting, with his four carronades ever crammed to the
muzzle, and his cargo ready to be jettisoned at sight of a cruiser. And
this man talked as if he were in church! Talked--talked--the skipper
fairly gasped. "Oh, quite clear!" he mumbled. "Quite clear!" he
replied. "But it's an odd creed."

"Not a creed, my friend," Colonel Sullivan replied precisely. "But the
result of a creed. The result, thank God, of more creeds than one."

Captain Augustin cast a wild eye at the straining, shrieking rigging;
the sloop was lurching heavily. But whether he would or no, his eye
fluttered back and rested, fascinated, on the Colonel's face. Indeed,
from the hour, ten days earlier, which had seen him mount the side in
the Bordeaux river, Colonel John Sullivan had been a subject of growing
astonishment to the skipper. Captain Augustin knew his world tolerably.
In his time he had conveyed many a strange passenger from strand to
strand: haggard men who ground their shoulders against the bulkhead,
and saw things in corners; dark, down-looking adventurers, whose hands
flew to hilts if a gentleman addressed them suddenly; gay young sparks
bound on foreign service and with the point of honour on their lips, or
their like, returning old and broken to beg or cut throats on the
highway--these, and men who carried their lives in their hands, and men
who went, cloaked, on mysterious missions, and men who wept as the
Irish coast faded behind them, and men, more numerous, who wept when
they saw it again--he knew them all! All, he had carried them, talked
with them, learned their secrets, and more often their hopes.

But such a man as this he had never carried. A man who indeed wore
outlandish fur-trimmed clothes, and had seen, if his servant's sparse
words went for aught, outlandish service; but who neither swore, nor
drank above measure, nor swaggered, nor threatened. Who would not dice,
nor game--save for trifles. Who, on the contrary, talked of duty, and
had a peaceful word for all, and openly condemned the duello, and was
mild as milk and as gentle as an owl. Such a one seemed, indeed, the
fabled "phaynix," or a bat with six wings, or any other prodigy which
the fancy, Irish or foreign, could conceive.

Then, to double