Elizabethan patriots or pirates, or whatever you call them.
They say that at the end of his last voyage the villagers gathered
on the beach down there and saw the boat standing in from
the sea, and the new trees stood up in the boat like a mast,
all gay with leaves out of season, like green bunting.
And as they watched they thought at first that the boat
was steering oddly, and then that it wasn't steering at all;
and when it drifted to the shore at last every man in that
boat was dead, and Sir Walter Vane, with his sword drawn,
was leaning up against the tree trunk, as stiff as the tree."

"Now this is rather curious," remarked Paynter thoughtfully.
"I told you I collected legends, and I fancy I can tell you
the beginning of the story of which that is the end, though it
comes hundreds of miles across the sea."

He tapped meditatively on the table with his thin, taper fingers,
like a man trying to recall a tune. He had, indeed, made a hobby
of such fables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic
touch in telling them.

"Oh, do tell us your part of it?" cried Barbara Vane, whose air of sunny
sleepiness seemed in some vague degree to have fallen from her.

The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness,
and then began playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger
as he talked.

"If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge
of the forest narrows down between the desert and the great