reach their ears. In due course the sloop or felucca would turn
up--it always did--the rakish-looking craft, black of hull,
low in the water, and bristling with guns; the jolly Roger
flapping overhead, and myself for sole commander. By and by, as
usually happened, an East Indiaman would come sailing along full
of relations--not a necessary relation would be missing. And the
crew should walk the plank, and the captain should dance from his
own yardarm, and then I would take the passengers in hand--that
miserable group of well-known figures cowering on the quarter-
deck!--and then--and then the same old performance: the air thick
with magnanimity. In all the repertory of heroes, none is more
truly magnanimous than your pirate chief.

When at last I brought myself back from the future to the actual
present, I found that these delectable visions had helped me over
a longer stretch of road than I had imagined; and I looked
around and took my bearings. To the right of me was a long low
building of grey stone, new, and yet not smugly so; new, and yet
possessing distinction, marked with a character that did not
depend on lichen or on crumbling semi-effacement of moulding and
mullion. Strangers might have been puzzled to classify it; to
me, an explorer from earliest years, the place was familiar
enough. Most folk called it "The Settlement"; others, with quite
sufficient conciseness for our neighbourhood, spoke of "them
there fellows up by Halliday's"; others again, with a hint of
derision, named them the "monks." This last title I supposed to
be intended for satire, and knew to be fatuously wrong. I was
thoroughly acquainted with monks--in books--and well knew the cut
of their long frocks, their shaven polls, and their fascinating
big dogs, with brandy-bottles round their necks, incessantly