y that, but he
threw a spark at the captain's flashy waistcoat, and thought he detected
some other article in the capacious pockets vice the handkerchief.
Perhaps he may have been mistaken and perhaps not, though he was so very
suspicious an old villain that he sometimes did his friends injustice.
Nor did he put his thin brown fingers, with the few grains of snuff he
had dipped from the box, to his sheepskin nostrils till he had watched
the effect it had produced on those around him.

"Ah! my friends, I remember distinctly now all about it," continued the
captain, as he returned the kerchief and shook a few specks of the
titillating dust from his point-lace sleeve; "it is about three years
ago, just before you came to live with me, padre, that we fell in with a
large ship bound to Porto Rico. She had been disabled in an awful
hurricane, which had taken two of her masts clean off at the decks, and
was leaking badly. We, too, had been a little hurt in the same gale, and
having made a pretty good season, I was anxious to get back here and
give the crews a rest. Well, we made out the ship about an hour before
sunset, and it was quite dark before we came up with her. There she lay,
rolling like a log, though there was not much sea on, and we could hear
her chain-pumps clanking, and saw the water spouting out from her
scuppers as pure almost as it went into her hold. As we came up
alongside they hailed me for assistance, and said the ship was sinking,
and could not live till morning.

"Of course I could give them no actual assistance, situated as I
was"--here the narrator smiled as he glanced round upon his guests--"it
would have been simply absurd, you know, the idea of my putting men on
board to keep her afloat for the nearest gibbet. Bah! I did not dream of
such ridiculous nonsense. However, I determined to make her a visit,
and, if there should be any thing to save from the wreck in an undamaged
condition, why, I should look around.

"Not too much of that Port, _mi padre_; think of your rheumatism in the
morning! Doctor, you don't drink!

"Well, going on board, I found two lady passengers--the wife and
daughter of an old judge of the island of Porto Rico, with half a dozen
servants, who were all screaming, and praying, and beseeching me to save
them--all but one, a tall, graceful girl, with a large India shawl
wrapped around her shoulders, her white arms glancing through the folds,
and a pair of dark, liquid, almond-s