Long years went by. Their majesties grew stout from high feeding and lack of exercise, hairy, dressed in skins of wild beasts, reigning each in his kingdom with a deal of dirty state and royalty. So Captain Woods found them when he went in the ship _Delicia_, to buy slaves. At the sight of his forty-gun ship they hid themselves in the woods, very suspicious, but presently learned his business, and came out of the woods, offering to sell their loyal negro subjects by hundreds in exchange for tobacco and suits of sailor clothes, tools, powder, and ball. They had now been twenty-five years in Madagascar, and, what with wars, accidents, sickness, there remained eleven sailor kings, all heartily bored with their royalty. Despite the attachments of their harems, children and swarms of grandchildren and dependents, they were sick for blue water, hungry for a cruise. Captain Woods observed that they got very friendly with his seamen, and learned that they were plotting to seize the ship, hoist the black flag, and betake themselves once more to piracy on the high seas. After that he kept their majesties at a distance, sending officers ashore to trade with them until he had completed his cargo of slaves. So he sailed, leaving eleven disconsolate pirate kings in a mournful row on the tropic beach, and no more has ever transpired as to them or the fate of their kingdoms. Still, they had fared much better than Captain Avery with his treasure of royal diamonds. XL A. D. 1776 DANIEL BOONE As a matter of unnatural history the British lion is really and truly a lioness with a large and respectable family. When only a cub she sharpened her teeth on Spain, in her youth crushed Holland, and in her prime fought France, wresting from each in turn the command of the sea. She was nearing her full strength when France with a chain of forts along the Saint Lawrence and the Mississippi attempted to strangle the thirteen British cubs in America. By the storming of Quebec the lion smashed that chain; but the long and world-wide wars with France had bled her dry, and unless she could keep the sea her cubs were doomed, so bluntly she told them they must help. The cubs had troubles of their own and could not help. Theirs was the legal, hers the moral right, but both sides fell in the wrong when they lost their tempers. Since then the mother of nations has reared her second litter with some of that gentleness which comes of sorrow. So far the French in Canada were not settlers so much as gay adventurers for the Christ, or for beaver skins, living among the Indians, or in a holiday mood leading the tribes against the surly British. So far the British overseas were not adventurers so much as dour fugitives from injustice at home, or from justice, or merely deported as a general nuisance, to join in one common claim to liberty, the fanatics of freedom.