Confirmatory evidence of this scandalous state of affairs was obtained, one sunny morning, in the most unexpected fashion. A fisherman named Luigi, paddling about the stern of the FLUTTERBY where, in consequence of the kitchen refuse thrown overboard, marine beasts of every shape and kind were wont to congregate, cast down his spear at what looked like a splendid caerulean flat-fish of uncommon size and brilliance. The creature shivered and collapsed at that contact in the most unnatural, unfishlike manner; and Luigi drew up, to his amazement, a fragment of a lady's dress--to wit, a short length of sky-blue CREPE DE CHINE. Bitterly disappointed, he nevertheless took the matter with the characteristic Southern philosophy. "This will do for my little Annarella," he decided. And doubtless the child, arrayed in these celestial tints, would have been the envy of all her girl companions at the next festival of the patron saint b for the fact that Mr. Freddy Parker was strolling on the beach at the very moment of the man's return to land. By a rare piece of good luck, as he himself phrased it, his eye fell upon the dripping fabric; by a stroke of intuition not rare but unique, he divined its worth as a sociological document. Promising the man a reasonable sum of money (the Commissioner happened to have no loose change in his pocket just then) he carried the incrimination morsel in triumph to the Residency, where it was displayed by his lady, to all and sundry, in corroboration of her theory. "That settles it," she used to say. "Unless indeed he dresses up his cabin-boy as a girl, and in that case...." Mr. Heard, reposing on the rough pumiceous ground with his eye fixed upon the naughty FLUTTERBY whose virginal whiteness, with declining day, had assumed a tell-tale crimson blush, pieced together these and sundry other little bits of information. They made him more than usually thoughtful; they chimed in with his momentary mood of self-analysis. One thing was dead certain. To circumnavigate the globe in the arms of a dozen chorus-girls was not his ideal. He was not built on those lines. He purposed, God Willing, to spend the evening of his days in another and more respectable manner. A vision arose before his imagination--a vision of a peaceful homestead among the green lanes of England, where he would lead a life of study and of kindly, unostentatious acts, with family and friends; old friends of College days, and London days, and African days; new friends from among the rising generation--straightforward and decent-minded youngsters, whom he would take to his heart like a father. Why could not van Koppen see the beauty of such dreamings?