h things of her.

Perhaps this was because she was unlike most other girls, and women too,
in that she had a sense of humour, got from having mixed with choice
spirits who visited her father and carried out at Angel Point a kind of
freemasonry, which had few rites and many charges and countercharges.
She had that almost impossible gift in a woman--the power of telling
a tale whimsically. It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new
Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused
by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while
Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors
from the Ninety-Nine. And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself,
undertook to carry a little keg of brandy into the house, under the very
nose of the young inspector, who had sought to mark his appointment
by the detection and arrest of Tarboe single-handed. He had never met
Tarboe or Tarboe's daughter when he made his boast. If his superiors had
known that Loco Bissonnette, Tarboe's jovial lieutenant, had carried
the keg of brandy into the house in a water-pail, not fifteen feet from
where Lafarge sat with Joan, they might have asked for his resignation.
True, the thing was cleverly done, for Bissonnette made the water spill
quite naturally against his leg, and when he turned to Joan and said
in a crusty way that he didn't care if he spilled all the water in the
pail, he looked so like an unwilling water-carrier that Joan for one
little moment did not guess. When she understood, she laughed till the
tears came to her eyes, and presently, because Lafarge seemed hurt, gave
him to understand that he was upon his honour if she told him what it
was. He consenting, she, still laughing, asked him into the house, and
then drew the keg from the pail, before his eyes, and, tapping it,
gave him some liquor, which he accepted without churlishness. He found
nothing in this to lessen her in his eyes, for he knew that women
have no civic virtues. He drank to their better acquaintance with few
compunctions; a matter not scandalous, for there is nothing like a witty
woman to turn a man's head, and there was not so much at stake after
all. Tarboe had gone on for many a year till his trade seemed like the
romance of law rather than its breach. It is safe to say that Lafarge
was a less sincere if not a less blameless customs officer from this
time forth. For humour on a woman's lips is a poten