Now, lago was not a villain; he was a venomous toad, a scorpion, a mad-dog, a poisonous plant in a fair meadow. There was nobody lago loved, no weakness he concealed, no point of contact with any human being. His sister was Pandora, his brother made the shirt of Nessus, himself dealt in Black Plagues and the Leprosy. The old Serpent was permitted to rise from his belly and walk upright on the tip of his tail when he met Iago, as a demonstration of moral superiority. But think of those three Babes-in-the-Wood villains, skipper Davis, the Yankee swashbuckler and ship scuttler; Herrick, the dreamy poet, ruined by commerce and early love, with his days of remorse and his days of compensatary liquor; and Huish, the great-hearted Scotch ruffian, who chafed at the conventional concealments of trade among pals and never could--as a true Scotchman--understand why you should wait to use a knife upon a victim when promptness lay in the club right at hand--think of them sailing out of Honolulu harbor on the Farallone. Let who will prefer to have sailed with Jason or Aeneas or Sinbad; but the Farallone and its precious freight of rascality gets my money every time. Think of the three incomparable reprobates afloat, with one case of smallpox and a cargo of champagne, daring to make no port, with over a hundred million square miles of ocean around them, every ten lookout knots of it containing a possible peril! It was simply grand--not pirates, shipwrecks or mutinies could beat that problem. And the pathos of the sixth day, when, with every man Jack of them looking delirium tremens in the face and suspecting each the other, Mr. Huish opened a new case of champagne and--found clear spring water under the French label! The honest scoundrels had been laid by the heels by a common wine merchant in the regular way of business! Oh, gentlemen, there should be honor in business; so that gallant villains can be free of betrayal. The keynote of these gentlemen is struck in the second chapter, where all three of them writing lies home--Davis and Herrick, sentimental equivocations, Huish the strongest of brag with nobody to send it to. In a burst of weakness Davis tells Herrick what a villain he has been, through rum, and how he can not let his daughter, “little Adar,” know it. “Yes, there was a woman on board,” he said, describing the ship he had scuttled. “Guess I sent her to hell, if there's such a place. I never dared go home again, and I don't know,” he added, bitterly, “what's come to them.” “Thank you, Captain,” said Herrick, “I never liked you better!” Is it not in human nature to cuddle to a great sheepish murderer like that, who groans in secret for his little girl--if even the girl was truth? I think she turned out a myth, but he had the sentiment.