branching top making a literal roof for the otherwise
roofless hall--an enormous ant's nest was plastered, a black excrescence
looking like burnt paper, and which crumbled like soft crisp cinder as I
poked it with the barrel of my gun, to the dismay of its myriad little
red inhabitants--the only denizens it would seem of this
once-magnificent hall.

How had this almost baronial magnificence come to be in this far-away
corner of a desert island? At first I concluded that here was a relic of
the brief colonial prosperity of the Bahamas, when its cotton lords
lived like princes, with a slave population for retainers--days when
even the bootblacks in Nassau played pitch-and-toss with gold pieces;
but as I considered further, it seemed to me that the style of the
architecture and the age of the building suggested an earlier date.
Could it be that this had been the home of one of those early
eighteenth-century pirates who took pride in flaunting the luxury and
pomp of princes, and who had perhaps made this his headquarters and
stronghold for the storage of his loot on the return from his forays on
the Spanish Main? This, as the more spirited conjecture, I naturally
preferred, and, in default of exact information, decided to accept.

Who knows but that in this hall where the iguana lurked and the ants
laboured at their commonwealth, the redoubtable "Blackbeard"--known in
private life as Edward Teach--had held his famous "Satanic" revels,
decked out in the absurd finery of crimson damask waistcoat and
breeches, a red feather in his hat, and a diamond cross hanging from a
gold chain at his neck? There, perhaps, glass in hand, and "doxy on his
knee," he had roared out many a blood-curdling ditty in the choice
society of ruffians only less ruffianly than himself. Perhaps, too, this
other spacious building adjacent to the great hall, and connected with
it by a ruinous covered way, had been the sybarite's "harem"; for
"Blackbeard"--like that other famous gentleman whose beard was
blue--collected from his unfortunate captive ships treasure other than
doubloons and pieces of eight, and prided himself on his fine taste in
ladies.

The more I pondered upon this fancy, and remarked the extent of the
ruins--including several subsidiary out-houses--and noted, too, one or
two choked stone staircases that seemed to descend into the bowels of
the earth, the more plausible it seemed. In one or two places where I
suspected underground cellar