"They had toiled hard and had kept up their spirits all the while and what is really wonderful under circumstances so calculated to try the temper and wear out the patience, they had got on exceedingly well with each other, and there had been no quarreling or ill feeling of any sort." At length the melancholy verdict was agreed upon in council. All the bright dreams of carrying home a fortune for every adventurer were reluctantly dismissed. The men were worn to the bone, and it was becoming more and more difficult to maintain communication with the _Alerte_. The prodigious excavation was abandoned, and Mr. Knight indulged himself in a soliloquy as he surveyed the "great trenches, the piled-up mounds of earth, the uprooted rocks, with broken wheelbarrows and blocks, worn-out tools, and other relics of our three months strewn over the ground; and it was sad to think that all the energy of these men had been spent in vain. They well deserved to succeed, and all the more so because they bore their disappointment with so much pluck and cheerfulness." But, in truth, the expedition had not been in vain. The toilers had been paid in richer stuff than gold. They had lived the true romance, nor could a man of spirit and imagination wish for anything more to his taste than to be encamped on a desert island, with the surf shouting in his ears, the sea birds crying, all hands up with daybreak to dig for buried treasure whose bearings were found on a tarpaulin chart that had belonged to a pirate with a deep scar across his cheek. How it would have delighted the heart of Robert Louis Stevenson to be one of this company of the _Alerte_ at Trinidad! The gallant little vessel, only sixty-four feet long she was, filled away for the West Indies, homeward bound, while the men aboard amused themselves by wondering how many nations might have laid claim to the treasure, had it been found;--England which hoisted its flag on Trinidad in 1770; Portugal because Portuguese from Brazil made a settlement there in 1750; Brazil, because the island lay off her coast; Spain, to whom the treasure had belonged, and Peru from whose cathedral it was taken, and lastly the Roman Church. In conclusion, Mr. Knight, to whose fascinating narrative, "The Cruise of the _Alerte_," I am indebted for the foregoing information, sums it up like a true soldier of fortune: "Well, indeed, it was for us that we had not found the pirates' gold; for we seemed happy enough as we were, and if possessed of this hoard, our lives would of a certainty have become a burden to us. We should be too precious to be comfortable. We should degenerate into miserable, fearsome hypochondriacs, careful of our means of transit, dreadfully anxious about what we ate or drank, miserably cautious about everything. 'Better far, no doubt,' exclaimed these cheerful philosophers, 'to remain the careless, happy paupers that we are.'