“Mabbe not, Livetenant, mabbe not; but I’ll miss my guess if it’s not a brigantine I’ve got in the field now, and laboring mightily she is. Take my word for it, Brown’s Island’ll be the death of her, unless they’ve got a skipper out of a thousand, and men of might to handle helm and canvas.” “Give me one peep before you take the glass,” pleaded Jenney, and jolly Holmes consenting, the young fellow so availed himself of the privilege that Cooke, who was a trifle short-sighted, and found his own eyes useless, protested,-- “It’s bad manners for any man to take so long a pull at the glass! Pass it around lively is the rule.” “My chance now,” cried Holmes peremptorily; so the three men watched, turn and turn about, until Holmes after a long survey handed the glass to Cooke, saying,-- “It’s time for me to go down and report to the governor. Stay you here and keep goal till I come back.” “All right. I’ll do it,” briefly replied Cooke, already absorbed in the sense of sight. In the wide house under the hill, where Bradford and his early love were growing placidly old together, there was a guest of unusual degree, and Lieutenant Holmes, requesting to see the governor at once, was ushered into the dining-room, where with the master and mistress of the house, their two sons and Gillian, sat a priest in the strait garb of the Jesuit, and bearing upon his thin, shrewd face the traces of that cultivation and worldly facility generally marking the Order which has ruled the world, and yet failed to save itself. This was Father Drouillette, a Frenchman by birth, a cosmopolitan by training, visiting the New World, not, as we may be sure, without a purpose, and yet quite capable of allowing himself to be torn in little shreds without suffering that purpose to be discovered. He had already been in Boston, and the fishing-smack that brought him from thence to Plymouth would with the morning’s tide sail for Manhattan, so that four-and-twenty hours comprised his stay in Plymouth; but this brief sojourn was enough for the Jesuit to see and know that the soil of the Old Colony was not yet ripe for the seeds of the cinchona (then called Jesuit’s Bark), and also to read Bradford’s noble nature and courteous kindliness, to both of which he did full justice in his report, adding that as the day was Friday, the governor gave him an excellent dinner of fish. After the fish came a delicate pudding, succeeded by a dessert, over which the family still sat when Lieutenant Holmes, entering the room, reported three large vessels in distress driving into the harbor, and already off Beach Point. “Are the lives of the mariners in danger?” inquired the priest, crossing himself so unobtrusively that only Bradford perceived the gesture. “I fear for them if they do not keep to the channel, for the tide is on the ebb, and ’tis but a crooked course,” replied Holmes; and the governor, rising, said somewhat hurriedly,--