s she was verging
on fifty years, and only weighed fifty pounds, with never a pound in her
pocket, I sighed my regrets. Ay, great compliment it was, but I declined
the honor. You yourself, _compadre_, must remember how I was received by
the people on the Buena Vista villa at Principe; how the obispo blessed
me, the old general embraced me, and the beautiful marquesa, with the
hour-glass waist, smiled on me."

"_Cierto!_" That astute old Spaniard never forgot any thing, particularly
a debt due to him; and he remembered, moreover, to have heard that when
the noble _Mi Lord Inglez_ left the villa one dark night, a good deal of
plate, jewels, doubloons, and other valuable property disappeared with
him. Ay, the sly old fellow had a faint recollection as well of seeing
a heavily-armed schooner running the gauntlet through the forts before
daylight, and that she left a certain bag of gold ounces for him--Don
Ignacio Sanchez--somewhere in a secret hole beneath a well-known rock
inside the harbor. Oh, a wonderful memory for matters of this nature
had our rapacious one-eyed acquaintance!

"Yes," went on his partner in many a scene of pillage and crime, "I have
every reason to know that I won the hearts, and purses too, sometimes,
of some of the fine people I met in refined society. But yet there have
been occasions when the game has gone against me--"

Don Ignacio's tenacious memory came again into play, and he looked back
to the time when he himself had cleaned his profuse friend out of all
his gains at the card-table, even to the buttons off his coat; but he
gave no sign of remembrance of those days, and only blew a dense cloud
of smoke from his thin yellow nostrils as the captain spoke.

"--Though those occasions have not been of frequent recurrence."

The good Padre Ricardo at this juncture hoped that, by Saint Barnabas,
luck might, in all time to come, befriend his son and patron; croaking,
too, with a goblet of punch to his unctuous lips, "_Vamonos!_ Tell us
more of the adorable Dona Lucia!"

Captain Brand rapped his snuff-box, opened the diamond-crusted lid, took
a dainty pinch, laid his cambric handkerchief over his kerseymere
breeches, and resumed his narrative.

"So passed the days, _caballeros_; and when, one morning, the high
mountains back of Port Guantamano were reported to me, I felt a
presentiment that my dream of bliss was drawing to a close. Indeed, I
might probably have remained at sea a week or two long