e, he has written home to that lady
requesting her, in rather peremptory terms, to "come out to them." Miss
Pritty, resenting the tone of the request as much as it was in her
nature to resent anything, went off instanter, in a gush of tender love
and sympathy, and took passage in the first ship that presented itself
as being bound for the China seas. She did not know much about ships.
Her maritime ideas were vague. If a washing-tub had been advertised
just then as being A1 at Lloyds' and about to put forth for that region
of the earth with every possible convenience on board for the delight of
human beings, she would have taken a berth in it at once.

We do not intend to inflict Miss Pritty's voyage on our reader. Suffice
it to say that she survived it, reached China in robust health, and
found her sick friend,--who had recovered,--in a somewhat similar
condition.

After an embrace such as women alone can bestow on each other, Miss
Pritty, holding her friend's hand, sat down to talk. After an hour of
interjectional, exclamatory, disconnected, irrelevant, and largely
idiotical converse--sustained chiefly by herself--Miss Pritty said:--

"And oh! The pirates!"

She said this with an expression of such awful solemnity that Aileen
could not forbear smiling as she asked--

"Did you see any?"

"Gracious! No," exclaimed Miss Pritty, with a look of horror, "but we
_heard_ of them. Only think of that! If I have one horror on earth
which transcends all other horrors in horribleness, that horror is--
pirates. I once had the misfortune to read of them when quite a girl--
they were called Buccaneers, I think, in the book--and I have never got
over it. Well, one day when we were sailing past the straits of
Malacca,--I think it was,--our captain said they were swarming in these
regions, and that he had actually seen them--more than that, had slain
them with his own--oh! It is too horrible to think of. And our captain
was _such_ a dear good man too. Not fierce one bit, and _so_ kind to
everybody on board, especially the ladies! I really _cannot_ understand
it. There are such dreadfully strange mixtures of character in this
world. _No_, he did not say he had slain them, but he used nautical
expressions which amount to the same thing, I believe; he said he had
spiflicated lots of 'em and sent no end of 'em to somebody's locker. It
may be wrong in me even to quote such expressions, dear Aileen, but I
cannot explai