hard for 'em to prove their claims, sir, if what McGosh told
me was true. Accordin' to his account, the gold came from all
sides--starboard and larboard, as a body might say--and it was jumbled
together, and so mixed, that a young girl could not pick out her lover's
keepsake from among the other pieces. 'T was the 'arnin's of three years
cruisin', as I understood him to say; and much of the stuff had been
exchanged in port, especially to get the custom-house officers and king's
officers out of its wake. There's king's officers among them bloody
Spaniards, Deacon Pratt, all the same as among the English."

"Be temperate in your language, friend; a rough speech is unseemly,
particularly of the Lord's day."

Daggett rolled the tobacco over his tongue, and his eyes twinkled with a
sort of leer, which indicated that the fellow was not without some humour.
He submitted patiently to the rebuke, however, making no remonstrance
against its reception.

"No, no," he added presently, "a starn chase, they say, is a long chase;
and the owners of them doubloons, if owners they can now be called, must
be out of sight, long before this. Accordin' to McGosh, some of the gold
r'aally captured had passed back through the hands of them that sent it to
sea, and they did not know their own children!"

"It is certainly hard to identify coin, and it would be a bold man who
should stand up, in open court, and make oath to its being the same he had
once held. I have heard of the same gold's having answered the purposes of
twenty banks, one piece being so like another."

"Ay, ay, sir, gold is gold; and any of it is good enough for me, though
doubloons is my favour_ites_. When a fellow has got half-a-dozen doubloons
alongside of his ribs, he can look the landlord full in the eye; and no
one thinks of saying to sich as he, 'it's time to think of shipping
ag'in.'"

From the nature of this discourse, it will not be easy for the reader to
imagine the real condition of Daggett. At the very moment he was thus
conversing of money, and incidentally manifesting his expectations of
accompanying Roswell Gardiner in the expedition that was about to sail,
the man had not actually four-and-twenty hours of life in him. Mary Pratt
had foreseen his true state, accustomed as she was to administer to the
wants of the dying; but no one else appeared to be aware of it, not even
the deacon. It was true that the fellow spoke, as it might be, from his
throat only,