visits; still less did they suspect that any passages of sentiment had
passed between the young people.

[Illustration: "He Had Found the Captain Agreeable and Companionable"

_Illustration from_
SEA ROBBERS OF NEW YORK

_by_ Thomas A. Janvier

_Originally published in_
HARPER'S MAGAZINE, _November_, 1894]

The truth was that Mainwaring and the young lady were very deeply in
love. It was a love that they were obliged to keep a profound secret,
for not only had Eleazer Cooper held the strictest sort of testimony
against the late war--a testimony so rigorous as to render it
altogether unlikely that one of so military a profession as Mainwaring
practiced could hope for his consent to a suit for marriage, but
Lucinda could not have married one not a member of the Society of
Friends without losing her own birthright membership therein. She
herself might not attach much weight to such a loss of membership in
the Society, but her fear of, and her respect for, her uncle led her
to walk very closely in her path of duty in this respect. Accordingly
she and Mainwaring met as they could--clandestinely--and the stolen
moments were very sweet. With equal secrecy Lucinda had, at the
request of her lover, sat for a miniature portrait to Mrs. Gregory,
which miniature, set in a gold medallion, Mainwaring, with a mild,
sentimental pleasure, wore hung around his neck and beneath his shirt
frill next his heart.

In the month of April of the year 1820 Mainwaring received orders to
report at Washington. During the preceding autumn the West India
pirates, and notably Capt. Jack Scarfield, had been more than usually
active, and the loss of the packet _Marblehead_ (which, sailing from
Charleston, South Carolina, was never heard of more) was attributed to
them. Two other coasting vessels off the coast of Georgia had been
looted and burned by Scarfield, and the government had at last aroused
itself to the necessity of active measures for repressing these pests
of the West India waters.

Mainwaring received orders to take command of the _Yankee_, a swift,
light-draught, heavily armed brig of war, and to cruise about the
Bahama Islands and to capture and destroy all the pirates' vessels he
could there discover.

On his way from Washington to New York, where the _Yankee_ was then
waiting orders, Mainwaring stopped in Philadelphia to bid good-by to
his many friends in that city. He called at the old Cooper house. It
was on a Sunday afterno