carefully kept within the frame of his simple mind. But all this is but
a laborious searching of memories. My present feeling is that the story
could not have been told otherwise. The hint for Gaspar Ruiz the man
I found in a book by Captain Basil Hall, R.N., who was for some time,
between the years 1824 and 1828, senior officer of a small British
Squadron on the West Coast of South America. His book published in the
thirties obtained a certain celebrity and I suppose is to be found still
in some libraries. The curious who may be mistrusting my imagination are
referred to that printed document, Vol. II, I forget the page, but it
is somewhere not far from the end. Another document connected with this
story is a letter of a biting and ironic kind from a friend then in
Burma, passing certain strictures upon "the gentleman with the gun on
his back" which I do not intend to make accessible to the public. Yet
the gun episode did really happen, or at least I am bound to believe it
because I remember it, described in an extremely matter-of-fact tone,
in some book I read in my boyhood; and I am not going to discard the
beliefs of my boyhood for anybody on earth.

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like Il Conde,
associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on
warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship
but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain
Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second
Officer. Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember
with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without
however mentioning his name, in the first paper of The Mirror of the
Sea. In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and
it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth
of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence
of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in the story is