uch matter, for we are all of the same race and
enterprising spirit--can be better described in respect of its present
condition by a shorter and far more expressive word.

Amongst my other duties I had charge of all the colonel's voluminous
correspondence, he having a mortal hatred to all letter writing in any
shape or form, and in addition to my good patron's business
communications, was entrusted with the task of despatching a lengthy
epistle every other mail--they went fortnightly from La Guayra to
France--informing Miss Elsie of our doings, the colonel himself adding
the briefest of postscripts to his _pequina nina_, as he invariably
termed her and always enclosing some remembrance for his little
daughter, to show that his love exceeded any epistolary proof of the
same, as well as a more substantial token of a handsome cheque for her
maintenance and education, forwarded to the care of the mother superior
of the convent.

Of all my manifold duties this was the pleasantest I had to perform,
being as grateful as water poured on the parched soil of my exile
amongst an alien people, antagonistic to me in everything, and with whom
I had to shape a steady course, and preserve a "stiff weather helm," as
sailors say, to avoid open rupture and assassination, the Venezuelese
"sticking at nothing," especially when that "nothing" happened to be one
whom, for some sufficient reason to their minds, they deemed an enemy
and they chanced to be behind his back--and as I told you before, I
steered clear of many enemies, but I could never learn to trust them as
a people.

Yes, my happiest hours at San Felipe were spent in writing to little
Elsie, who answered my own letters, as well as those I despatched on
behalf of the colonel, with unvarying punctuality, holding to the
promise she spontaneously gave in England when we parted on her going to
school, at which time she had no idea of my ever accompanying her father
to South America.

Similarly, the saddest task that could have been laid on my shoulders
fell to my lot five years later, when the mysterious attraction by which
I had been drawn towards her as a boy had grown into the most absorbing
affection--a love that filled my heart.

And I had to write and tell her--I, who would cheerfully have laid down
my life to save her a pang--to tell her of her dear father's death.

This occurred just as poor Colonel Vereker had arranged for my returning
with him to the capital of the St