tes? Might he not have followed hot on the trail of hidden treasure? My
cheeks burned as I tried to put the question.

"Did you--" I began, "did you--"

"Well?" he encouraged. "Did I what, John?"

"Oh, did you," I burst out, "ever see a pirate ship, an' pirates--real
ones?"

His face lit up.

"Surely," he replied casually, "many an one."

"P'raps--" ventured Angel, with an excited laugh, "p'raps you're one
yourself!"

The old gentleman searched our eager faces with his wide-open, sea blue
eyes, then he looked cautiously into the room behind him, and, apparently
satisfied that no one could overhear, he put his hand to the side of his
mouth, and said in a loud hoarse whisper--

"That I am. Pirate as ever was!"

I think you could have knocked me down with a feather. I know my knees
shook and the room reeled. The Seraph was the first to recover, piping
cheerfully--

"I yike piwates!"

"Yes," repeated the old gentleman, reflectively, "pirate as ever was. The
things I've seen and done would fill the biggest book you ever saw, and
it'd make your hair stand on end to read it--what with fights, and murders,
and hangings, and storms, and shipwreck, and the hunt for gold! Many a
sweet schooner or frigate I've sunk, or taken for myself; and there isn't a
port on the South Seas where women don't hush their children crying with
the fear of Captain Pegg."

Then he added hastily, as though he feared he had gone too far:

"But I'm a changed man, mark you--a reformed man. If things suit me pretty
well here I don't think I shall break out again. It is just that you chaps
seem so sympathetic makes me tell you all this; but you must swear never to
breathe a word of it, for no one knows but you. My son and daughter-in-law
think I'm an archaeologist. It'd be an awful shock to them to find that I'm
a pirate."

We swore the blackest secrecy, and were about to ply him with a hundred
questions, when we saw a maid carrying a large tray enter the room behind
him.

Captain Pegg, as I must now call him, gave us a gesture of warning and
began to lower his window. A pleasant aroma of roast beef came across the
alley. The next instant the flowered dressing-gown had disappeared and the
window opposite stared blankly as before.

Angel blew a deep breath. "Did you notice," he said, "how different he got
once he had told us he was a pirate--wilder and rougher, and used more
sailor words?"

"However did you guess it first?" I asked adm