a poem big enough to fix the Jewel of Fame firmly over the author's
brow.

Away back in the Allison strain somewhere must have been a bold buccaneer,
for who else but the descendant of a roystering, fighting, blood-letting
pirate could have seen the "scuppers glut with a rotting red?" Through all
the visible mildness of his deep and complex nature there surely runs a
blood-thirsty current, in proof of which I submit this single paragraph
from certain confessions[3] of his:

With character seared, abandoned and dissolute in habit, through
and by the hearing and seeing and reading of history, there was but
one desperate step left. So I entered upon the career of a pirate
in my ninth year. The Spanish Main, as no doubt you remember, was
at that time upon an open common just across the street from our
house, and it was a hundred feet long, half as wide and would
average two feet in depth. I have often since thanked Heaven that
they filled up that pathless ocean in order to build an iron
foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why
during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast
thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long
rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the
plank--even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured
them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that
iron foundry. Under the lee of the Northernmost promontory, near a
rock marked with peculiar crosses made by the point of the stiletto
which I constantly carried in my red silk sash, I buried tons of
plate, and doubloons, pieces of eight, pistoles, Louis d'ors, and
galleons by the chest. At that time galleons somehow meant to me
money pieces in use, though since then the name has been given to a
species of boat. The rich brocades, Damascus and Indian stuffs,
laces, mantles, shawls and finery were piled in riotous profusion
in our cave where--let the whole truth be told if it must--I lived
with a bold, black-eyed and coquettish Spanish girl, who loved me
with ungovernable jealousy that occasionally led to bitter and
terrible scenes of rage and despair. At last when I brought home a
white and red English girl, whose life I spared because she had
begged me on her knees by the memory of my sainted mother to spare
her for her old father, who