appetite among Dutch and Danish privateers. Such excellent work did
Ranulph against the Dutchmen, that Richambeau, the captain, gave him a
gun for himself, and after they had fought the Danes made him a master-
gunner. Of the largest gun on the Victoire Ranulph grew so fond that at
last he called her ma couzaine.

Days and weeks passed, until one morning came the cry of "Land! Land!"
and once again Ranulph saw British soil--the tall cliffs of the peninsula
of Gaspe. Gaspe--that was the ultima Thule to which Mattingley and
Carterette had gone.

Presently, as the Victoire came nearer to the coast, he could see a bay
and a great rock in the distance, and, as they bore in now, the rock
seemed to stretch out like a vast wall into the gulf. As he stood
watching and leaning on ma couzaine, a sailor near him said that the bay
and the rock were called Perce.

Perce Bay--that was the exact point for which Elie Mattingley and
Carterette had sailed with Sebastian Alixandre. How strange it was! He
had bidden Carterette good-bye for ever, yet fate had now brought him to
the very spot whither she had gone.

The Rock of Perce was a wall, three hundred feet high, and the wall was
an island that had once been a long promontory like a battlement, jutting
out hundreds of yards into the gulf. At one point it was pierced by an
archway. It was almost sheer; its top was flat and level. Upon the
sides there was no verdure; upon the top centuries had made a green
field. The wild geese as they flew northward, myriad flocks of gulls,
gannets, cormorants, and all manner of fowl of the sea, had builded upon
the summit until it was rich with grass and shrubs. The nations of the