me with
all thy might. We'll fill an empty hour with stories of his valor!" He
put forth his hand and turned the hour-glass, and the carpenter began to
stammer and make excuses, which no whit availed him.

At last, one afternoon, they came to Margarita, and, the ship needing
water, they entered a placid bight, where a strip of dazzling sand lay
between the rippling surf and a heavy wood, but found beforehand with
them a small bark from the mainland, her crew ashore filling barrels
from a limpid spring, and her master and a Franciscan friar eating fruit
upon her tiny poop. The dozen on land showed their heels; the worthless
bark was taken, a party with calivers landed to complete the filling of
the abandoned casks, and the master and the friar brought before the
Captain of the _Sea Wraith_ where he sat beneath a great tree, tasting
the air of the land. An insatiable gatherer of Spanish news, it was his
custom to search for what crumbs of knowledge his captives might
possess, but hitherto the yield, pressed together, had not made even a
small cake of enlightenment. He was prepared to have shortly done with
the two who now stood before him. The seaman cringed, expecting torture,
furtively watching for some indication of what the Englishman wished him
to say. A fellow new to these parts and ignorant, he would have sworn a
highway to El Dorado itself if that was the point towards which his
inquisitor's quiet, unemphatic questions tended; but he knew not, and
his lies fell dead before the grave eyes of the man beneath the tree. At
last he was tossed aside like a squeezed sponge and the Franciscan
beckoned forward, who, being of sturdier make, twisted his thumbs in his
rope girdle and prepared to present a blank countenance to those queries
of armaments and treasure which an enemy to Spain would naturally make.
But the Englishman asked strange questions; so general that they seemed
to encompass the mainland from Tres Puntas to Nombre de Dios, and so
particular that it was even as if he were interested in the friar
himself, his order, and his wanderings from town to town, the sights
that he had seen and the people whom he had known. The questions seemed
harmless as mother's milk, but the friar was shrewd; moreover, in his
youth had been driven to New Spain by flaming zeal for the conversion of
countless souls. That fire had burned low, but by its dying light he
knew that this man, who was young and yet so still, whose lowered vo