occasional palms, very savage and impenetrable. Miles of such
ferocious vegetation separated me from the spot where my treasure was
lying. Certainly it was tough-looking stuff to fight one's way through;
but those sumptuous words of Henry P. Tobias's narrative kept on making
a glorious glitter in my mind: "_The first is a sum of one million and
one half dollars.... The other is a sum of one million dollars.... The
first pod was taken from a Spanish merchant and it is in Spanish silver
dollars. The other on Short Shrift Island is in different kinds of
money, taken from different ships of different nations ... it is all
good money._"

In fact I found to my surprise that I had the haunting thing by heart,
as though it had been a piece of poetry; and over and over again it kept
on going through my head.

Then Tom came up with my breakfast. The old fellow stood by to serve me
as I ate, with a pathetic touch of the old slavery days in his
deferential, half-fatherly manner, dropping a quaint remark every now
and again; as, when drawing my attention to the sun bursting through the
clouds, he said, "The poor man's blanket is coming out, sah"--phrases in
which there seemed a whole world of pathos to me.

Presently, when breakfast was over, and I stood looking over the side
into the incredibly clear water, in which it seems hardly possible that
a boat can go on floating, suspended as she seems over gleaming gulfs of
liquid space, down through which at every moment it seems she must
dizzily fall, Tom drew my attention to the indescribably lovely
"sea-gardens" over which we were passing--waving purple fans, fairy
coral grottoes, and jewelled fishes, lying like a rainbow dream under
our rushing keel. Well might the early mariners people such submarine
paradises with sirens and beautiful water-witches, and imagine a fairy
realm down there far under the sea.

As Tom and I gazed down lost in those rainbow deeps, I heard a voice at
my elbow saying with peculiarly sickening unction:

"The wonderful works of God."

It was my unwelcome passenger, who had silently edged up to where we
stood. I looked at him, with the question very clear in my eyes as to
what kind of disagreeable animal he was.

"Precisely," I said, and moved away.

I had been trying to feel more kindly toward him, wondering whether I
could summon up the decency to offer him a cigar, but "the wonderful
works of God" finished me.

"Hello! Captain," I said presently