pidly than goods are apt to pass through the
custom-houses. Under a merely nominal recognizance, he sailed away with
flying colors, and amid the plaudits of an admiring crowd, among whom,
it is to be presumed, the authorities took care to be only not too
conspicuous.

But the authorities on the sea, who could not so readily get a cue from
Wellington, with the directness, in construing orders, which is the
habit of the military mind, took their instructions at the word.
Commanded to intercept all marauders and pirates, they kept a look-out
for Walker. He eluded the guns of Captain Chatard, but Commodore
Paulding seized him in the very act of invading a friendly soil.
Hoisting him on board of a war-ship, he returned him in pressing haste
to the President. Commodore Paulding, who had read the Message, and read
the instructions of Secretary Cass, doubtless supposed that black meant
black, and white, white. Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride
with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action,
in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in
maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his
mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a
sword by Congress. Alas for such hopes! Commodore Paulding was clearly
not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant
black,--nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the
President, was the present of something worse than an elephant. It
was the present of a herd of elephants,--of a sea of troubles. Mr.
Buchanan's fine denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words
for the public ear; secretly he cherished a _penchant_ for freebooters,
or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those
circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief
of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of
simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of
obedience, in any subordinate. What to do was the question. He had
menaced Chatard with a cashiering for allowing Walker to escape; and
here was Paulding, who did not allow him to escape,--so he menaced
Paulding likewise; and by way of capping the climax of absurdities, he
set Walker himself at large, to go about the country clamoring to be
sent back, at the expense of the government, to the scenes of his late
innocent occupations and virtuous designs, whence he had bee