"And when you says, says you," he added, sidling up to me, "Old George never see'd a _Royal Fortune_, says you--why, you're saying what's right and fair, and I thanks you, sir. I thanks you with a true sailor's 'eart "; at which he would have wrung my hand. But I had no hand ready for him; I barely heard his words. Whydah--the Guinea coast--the ship _Royal Fortune!_ The truth came so suddenly upon me that I had not the wit to keep silence. I could have bitten off my tongue the next moment. As it was I caught most of the sentence back. But the beginning of it jumped from my mouth. "At last I know"--I began and stopped. "What?" said Mr. Glen, with his whole face distorted into an insinuating grin. But he was standing very close to me and a little behind my back. "That my father thrashed me over twenty years ago," said I, clapping my hand to my coat tails and springing away from him. "And you have never forgotten it," said he. "On the contrary," said I, "I have only just remembered it." Mr. Glen moved away from the table and walked towards the door. Thus he disclosed the table to me, and I laughed very contentedly. Mr. Glen immediately turned. He had reached the door, and he stood in the doorway biting shreds of skin from his thumb. "You are in good spirits," said he, rather surlily. "I was never in better," said I. "The motions of inanimate bodies are invariably instructive." I was very willing he should think me half-witted. He went grumbling up the stairs; I turned me again to the picture of the sailor's return. Whydah--the Guinea coast--the ship _Royal Fortune!_ It may have been in some part the man's eagerness to deny all knowledge of the ship; it was, no doubt, in some part the picture of those gold watches, which awakened my memories. Watches of just such gold were dangling for sale on a pedler's stall when first I heard of the ship _Royal Fortune_. The whole scene came back to me most vividly--the market-place of an old country town upon a fair day, the carts, the crowds, the merry-go-rounds, the pedler's stall with the sham gold watches, and close by the stall a ragged hawker singing a ballad of the _Royal Fortune_, and selling copies of the ballad--a ballad to which was added the last confessions of four men hung for piracy at Cape Coast Castle within the flood-marks. It was well over twenty years since that day, but I remembered it now with a startling distinctness. There was a rough woodcut upon the title-page of the ballad representing four men hanging in chains upon four gibbets. I had bought one that afternoon, and my father had taken it from me and thrashed me soundly for reading it. But I had read it! My memory was quickened now to an almost supernatural clearness. I could almost turn over the pages in my mind and read it again. All four men--one of them was named Ashplant, a second Moody--went to the gallows without any sign of penitence. There was a third so grossly stupid--yes, his name