on the high seas."

The colonel took advantage of the interval that would necessarily have
to elapse before his presence would again be required in court to escort
Miss Elsie to Paris, and place her under the care of the sisters at the
convent at Neuilly, where, I think I told you before, he said her mother
had been brought up and educated; while the skipper and others of us
belonging to the _Star of the North_, being compelled to remain within
handy reach of the authorities, in case our presence at the trial might
be required, the opportunity was seized to lay the old barquey up in dry
dock and give her a thorough overhaul within and without, though the
engines, as proved by our rapid passage here, were none the worse for
our breakdown in mid-Atlantic, thanks to the skill and exertions of poor
Stoddart and the rest of old Mr Stokes' staff.

Most of us in this way got a short holiday while awaiting the assizes,
which I spent with my mother and sister, taking home with me the money I
had been awarded as my share of the _Saint Pierre's_ salvage, which had
made me fancy myself a temporary Croesus.

Alas, though, the sum, large though it was for a young fellow to find
unexpectedly in his pocket, went but a very short step in satisfying the
rapacious wolf I found at my mother's door when I reached the little
cottage, where she lived with my sister Janet, in one of the suburbs of
Liverpool.

A bubble company, whose directors had all been selected for their
religious bias rather than their business qualifications, burst at one
fell coup, almost in the very hour of my return home, dissipating into
thin air, as the Latin poet has it, all the savings of a lifetime which
my mother had invested in the swindle--the provision left behind by my
father, when he died, for her use, and the subsequent benefit of my
sister and myself. The devout rogue who had "managed" the concern to
his own worldly interest and that of his fellow religionists, carried on
the same, so they said, in a pious and eminently "Christian way," no
doubt, respected alike in the eyes of God and men, according to the
loudly-voiced tenets of the particular sect, to which he and his co-
directors mostly belonged; but he managed, all the same, to carry off to
a remote and friendly land outside the pale of international law, and
where dividends need no longer be paid to clamorous creditors, a
considerable amount of portable property of a valuable nature, amongst
whi