whose satellites were yellow-skinned slant-eyed Easterns, pirates to a man, and willing enough to slit a throat at the faintest sign from a master. As I stood there, leaning against the side, gloomily staring at the shore, which was so near, and yet so impossible of access, I reviewed a point which was of more importance to me than may be imagined--the point of our geographical situation. I have already said that the yawl lay at anchor in a sheltered cove. The position of that cove was peculiar. It was entered from seawards by an extremely narrow inlet, across the mouth of which stretched a bar--I could realize that much by watching the breakers rolling over it; it was plain to me, a landsman, that even a small vessel could only get in or out of the cove at high water. But once across the bar, and within the narrow entry, any vessel coming in from the open sea would find itself in a natural harbour of great advantages; the cove ran inland for a good mile and was quite another mile in width; its waters were deep, rising some fifteen to twenty feet over a clear, sandy bottom, and on all sides, right down to the bar at its entrance, it was sheltered by high cliffs, covered from the tops of their headlands to the thin, pebbly stretches of shore at their feet by thick wood, mostly oak and beech. That the cove was known to the folk of that neighbourhood it was impossible to doubt, but I felt sure that any strange craft passing along the sea in front would never suspect its existence, so carefully had Nature concealed the entrance on the landward side of the bar. And there were no signs within the cove itself that any of the shore folk ever used it. There was not a vestige of a human dwelling-place to be discovered anywhere along its thickly-wooded banks; no boat lay on its white beach; no fishing-net was stretched out there to dry in the sun and wind; the entire stretch was desolate. And I knew that an equal desolation lay all over the land immediately behind the cove and its sheltering woods. That was about the loneliest part of a lonely coast--by that time I had become well acquainted with it. For some miles, north and south of that exact spot, there were no coast villages--there was nothing, save an isolated farmstead, set in deep ravines at wide distances. The only link with busier things lay in the railway--that, as I also knew, lay about two or two-and-a-half miles inland; as far as I could recollect the map which lay in my pocket, but which I did not dare to pull out, there was a small wayside station on this line, immediately behind the woods through which Miss Raven and I had unthinkingly wandered to our fate; from it, doubtless, the Frenchman, Baxter's accomplice, had taken train for Berwick, some twenty miles northward. Everything considered, Miss Raven and I were as securely trapped and as much at our captor's mercy as if we had been immured in a twentieth-century Bastille.