suffered his conscience, which was not a good one, to get
the better of him.

In one of his adventures he had sailed a Welsh brig from Liverpool to
Reykjavik. This had been his introduction to the Icelandic capital,
then a little, hungry, creeping settlement, with its face towards
America and its wooden feet in the sea. It had also been his
introduction to the household of the Welsh merchant, who had a wharf
by the old Canning basin at Liverpool, a counting-house behind his
residence in Wolstenholme Square, and a daughter of five and twenty.
Jorgen, by his own proposal, was to barter English produce for
Icelandic tallow. On his first voyage he took out a hundred tons of
salt, and brought back a heavy cargo of lava for ballast. On his
second voyage he took out the Welshman's daughter as his wife, and
did not again trouble to send home an empty ship.

He had learned that mischief was once more brewing between England
and Denmark, had violated his English letters of marque and run
into Copenhagen, induced the authorities there, on the strength
of his knowledge of English affairs, to appoint him to the
Governor-Generalship of Iceland (then vacant) at a salary of four
hundred pounds a year, and landed at Reykjavik with the Icelandic
flag, of the white falcon on the blue ground--the banner of the
Vikings--at the masthead of his father-in-law's Welsh brig.

Jorgen Jorgensen was then in his early manhood, and the strong heart
of the good man did not decline with years, but rode it out with him
through life and death. He had always intended to have a son and
build up a family. It was the sole failure of his career that he had
only a daughter. That had been a disaster for which he was not
accountable, but he prepared himself to make a good end of a bad
beginning. With God's assistance and his own extreme labor he meant
to marry his daughter to Count Trollop, the Danish minister for
Iceland, a functionary with five hundred a year, a house at
Reykjavik, and another at the Danish capital.

This person was five-and-forty, tall, wrinkled, powdered, oiled, and
devoted to gallantry. Jorgen's daughter, resembling her Welsh mother,
was patient in suffering, passionate in love, and fierce in hatred.
Her name was Rachel. At the advent of Count Trollop she was twenty,
and her mother had then been some years dead.

The Count perceived Jorgen's drift, smiled at it, silently acquiesced
in it, took even a languid interest in it, arising p