lipper."

The captain got up from his chair, stepped to the settee, and, pulling
the signal-cord on the wall, held a short dialogue with the man at the
station; then, saying in a low, sharp whisper through the tube, "A
bright look-out, Pedro!" he resumed his place at the table. The doctor
had, in the mean while, got up and gone to the veranda, where, swinging
in a Yucatan grass hammock, shielded from the night wind, lay his little
patient sleeping soundly. Carefully closing the curtains again around
him, he returned to his place. The padre was now all awake again, with
his thick lips open, waiting for the captain to go on with his story. As
for Don Ignacio, he never stirred body or limb, but his eye traveled
about perpetually, and he observed the movements of his companions all
at the same time. Still the hoarse roar of the pirates in their carouse
arose from the covered sheds in the calm night, and the two solitary
lights from each mast-head of the felucca and schooner twinkled above
the basin of the inlet.

"And now, _amigos_," began again Captain Brand, after he had assured
himself that all was going on as he could wish without, "I shall inform
you of the sequel of my adventure with the Senorita Lucia. The evening
after the night on which I had declared my passion, we were seated at
dinner in the after cabin. Such a choice little dinner, too, as only our
late friend, Lascar Joe, could prepare! Poor fellow, he'll never make
another of those famous curries, though, no doubt, he'll find fire and
pepper enough where he is, if the devil chooses to employ him. What a
neat hand he was, too, with that spiral-bladed Malay creese of his! Ah!
well--we were sitting over the dessert, and I was relating to my pretty
passenger some account of my early days, and of my lady mother and my
old squire of a father, omitting, perhaps, some few uninteresting
details--"

Here the old commander of the felucca cackled, and his black, beady eye
glittered as the thought flashed through his head as to what details his
villainous compeer had omitted. How he forged his old father's name,
which brought down his gray hairs in sorrow and disgrace to the grave;
and how his poor mother, too, died of grief, together with other bitter
memories, all of which Captain Brand, the pirate, omitted to mention.

"Yes, I related likewise some of my early privateering adventures, when
all the broad Atlantic was alive with the fleets of France, England, and
S