seemed to suit the company, if the zest with
which they sang be any criterion. Care was taken to insure a sufficient
pause, too, after the chorus between each of the verses, to permit the
drinking, after all the essential part of the evening's entertainment,
to be performed without hindrance.

There was one man, however, from the post of honor which he occupied at
the head of the table evidently held in high consideration among the
habitues of the inn, who did not join in the singing. He was a little
man, who made up for his shortness of stature by breadth of shoulder and
length of arm. There was an ugly black patch over his left eye; no one
had ever seen him without that patch since the day of the assault on the
fort at Chagres; an Indian arrow had pierced his eye on that eventful
day. Men told how he had gone to the surgeon requesting him to pull it
out, and when the young doctor, who had been but a short time with the
buccaneers, shrank from jerking the barb out in view of the awful pain
which would attend his action, had hesitated, reluctant, the wounded man
had deliberately torn out the arrow, and with oaths and curses for the
other's cowardice had bound up the wound himself with strips torn from
his shirt and resumed the fighting. His courage there, and before and
after, although he was an illiterate person and could neither read nor
write, had caused him to be appointed boatswain of the ship that had
carried Morgan's flag, and he had followed his leader for many years
with a blind devotion that risked all and stuck at nothing to be of
service to him.

It had been many years since Master Benjamin Hornigold, coming down from
bleak New England because he found his natural bent of mind out of
harmony with the habits and customs of his Puritan ancestors, had
drifted into buccaneering under the flag of his chief. He was an old
man now, but those who felt the force of his mighty arms were convinced
that age had not withered him to any appreciable degree.

Aside from Morgan, Hornigold had loved but one human creature, his
younger brother, a man of somewhat different stamp, who had been
graduated from Harvard College but, impelled by some wild strain in his
blood and by the example of his brother, had joined the buccaneers.

There were many men of gentle blood who were well acquainted with the
polite learning of the day among these sea rovers from time to time, and
it is related that on that same Panama excursion when