es and tanned leathery white ones you can imagine
what a pink rosebud she seemed to be; and it wasn't like that she
stopped at that, for she could sing like a nightingale and talk to beat
the band; and her laugh itself was like music, sounding long afterwards
in your ears at sea. Hit? Jimini Christmas, I should say I was hit! Am
still, for that matter, with just the memory of her, though twenty years
have come and gone, and I loved the ground her little feet walked on.
Not that there was anything out of the way in that. We all did, down to
Portuguese Joe, and Billy Jones's cousin; and as for Elijah Coe, he
simply give one yelp and keeled over!

Coe was the captain and owner of the _Peep o' Day_ topsail schooner, and
had been trading about the Group for a matter of eight years. In all my
seafaring days I never saw his match for dare-deviltry or courage,
though a quieter man to look at there never was. He was about forty
years old, tall and lean, with a nose on him like a hawk; and to see him
stripped you'd think he was a boy, he was that straight and well set up.
A fine man to look at, very quick on his pins, and kind of proud and
silent in company like he was mostly thinking of something else. I
reckon perhaps he likely was, for he was splendidly educated, with rows
on rows of books in his cabin, and a cyclopediar six feet long. The mate
said he knew everything in it up to R, not to speak of working lunars in
a saucer of quicksilver, and reckonizing squid by its Latin name.

No one knew how he had got the money to buy his ship, which was a
remarkable fine vessel and fitted up regardless. Some said there was
once a name on the brass bell aft, which had been filed down careful and
worked over with emery paper afterwards; but I never could see no sign
of it myself, though I never went aboard but I took a good look; and
others who said it was Labor. He certainly knew a lot about the
Westward, and I heard him, one day, giving Captain Rick the directions
to enter Port McGuire by. But you know what a place the beach is for
talk, and, anyway, heaps of good men and highly respected have been
Blackbirders in their time, and I never could see no harm in the trade
myself. But the gossip was that he had flown the Peruvian flag and
emptied whole islands, though I never believed a word of it myself. It
was remarkable, too, how he kep his people, and how they looked up to
him, which wouldn't have been the case if he had been like they