departing romance. Historians are very much like other people.

However, History has nothing to do with this tale. Neither is the
moral justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. If
anything it is perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects
for his buried youth, as he lives it over again at the end of his
insignificant course on this earth. Strange person--yet perhaps
not so very different from ourselves.

A few words as to certain facts may be added.

It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long
adventure. But from certain passages (suppressed here because
mixed up with irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the
time of the meeting in the cafe, Mills had already gathered, in
various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who had been
introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had
learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived
furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his
best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set
(one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on
the other making friends with the people of the Old Town, pilots,
coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather
absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already credited with an
ill-defined and vaguely illegal enterprise in the Gulf of Mexico.
At once it occurred to Mills that this eccentric youngster was the
very person for what the legitimist sympathizers had very much at
heart just then: to organize a supply by sea of arms and
ammunition to the Carlist detachments in the South. It was
precisely to confer on that matter with Dona Rita that Captain