"You shall have a little gold collar and sit on a perch when I have my fifty acres" he confided to the monkey. The monkey, hearing a new noise, thought he was to be beaten and looked up prepared to bite--so it seemed to Sebastian as if he had understood. After a moment Sebastian fumbled a piece of cord from his pocket and tied one end about the monkey's neck--an attention the latter accepted with passive resignation--at least this latest owner seemed quieter than the others. "There," said Sebastian, "No, you must not bite at the cord--we are going to the Floridas, monkey, you and I--we shall be rich there, monkey," and he pulled his coat around further so the monkey should be warm. Then his eyes turned away from his new possession and lost themselves in watching the dance--and presently the girl who had been his partner and whose face was like some flower more savage than the rose came over and stood near him, her fan moving in a slow regular beat that ruffled the soft black fur on the top of the monkey's head. PART ONE: _The Pride of the Colonies_ Some five years later, the merchantman, "Pride of the Colonies," bound out of New York for St. Augustine, was running before a fresh breeze down the blue, sparkling plain of the Atlantic. The single passenger she carried, a young man named Andrew Beard, was seated in a sort of improvised chair by the lee-rail, watching the milk-streaked ribbon of her wake dwindle out continually along the broad, endless back of the sea, with that idle, rather pleasant monotony of mind which comes to those who have been many days on the water without much active occupation. A small, brown, dumpy copy of Mr. Pope's translation of the Iliad lay in his lap, and his forefinger mechanically kept the place where he had left off reading. He had been drawn from the book by a certain, inert curiosity as to whether the color of the waters of any ocean might fitly be compared with the color of wine--and having decided, sleepily, that not even the palest vintages of the Rhine, beheld through green Venetian glass, could match the occasional streaks of lucid emerald where the trace of the ship's wake grew faint as the imprint of a feather on velvet, had excused himself from further concern at present with the doings of the well-greaved Achæans.