Before continuing this narrative the reader may here be informed that
our hero had come into this enchanted world as the supercargo of the
ship SUSANNA HAYES, of Philadelphia; that he had for several years
proved himself so honest and industrious a servant to the merchant
house of the worthy Jeremiah Doolittle that that benevolent man had
given to his well-deserving clerk this opportunity at once of
gratifying an inclination for foreign travel and of filling a position
of trust that should redound to his individual profit. The SUSANNA
HAYES had entered Kingston Harbor that afternoon, and this was
Jonathan's first night spent in those tropical latitudes, whither his
fancy and his imagination had so often carried him while he stood over
the desk filing the accounts of invoices from foreign parts.

It might be finally added that, had he at all conceived how soon and to
what a degree his sudden inclination for adventure was to be gratified,
his romantic aspirations might have been somewhat dashed at the
prospect that lay before him.

II. The Mysterious Lady with the Silver Veil

At that moment our hero suddenly became conscious of the fact that a
small wicket in a wooden gate near which he stood had been opened, and
that the eyes of an otherwise concealed countenance were observing him
with the utmost closeness of scrutiny.

He had hardly time to become aware of this observation of his person
when the gate itself was opened, and there appeared before him, in the
moonlight, the bent and crooked figure of an aged negress. She was
clad in a calamanco raiment, and was further adorned with a variety of
gaudily colored trimmings, vastly suggestive of the tropical world of
which she was an inhabitant. Her woolly head was enveloped, after the
fashion of her people, in the folds of a gigantic and flaming red
turban constructed of an entire pocket-handkerchief. Her face was
pock-pitted to an incredible degree, so that what with this deformity,
emphasized by the pouting of her prodigious and shapeless lips, and the
rolling of a pair of eyes as yellow as saffron, Jonathan Rugg thought
that he had never beheld a figure at once so extraordinary and so
repulsive.

It occurred to our hero that here, maybe, was to overtake him such an
adventure as that which he had just a moment before been desiring so
ardently. Nor was he mistaken; for the negress, first looking this way
and then that, with an extremely wary and cunning