Well, when my little local magistrate fines me twenty-five hundred dollars I said I wouldn't pay it, that I'd stir things up at Washington, and so on, but they only laughed at me, and put her up for sale. Now I'd 've bid her in myself if I'd had the money, but I only had a couple of hundred dollars in cash for running expenses with me. All my Newfoundland friends down that way were poor people--fishermen. If 'twas home we could 'a' raised plenty of money on her, but I was in Newfoundland, not Gloucester, and they rushed the thing through. Well, the _Aurora_ was bid in for just the amount of the fine, and that was a shame, the vessel she was, and she was bid in by a man nobody seemed to know. I went to the man who bid her in and told him the whole story, of what the vessel meant to me, of how I came to bring the rum over, and asked him would he give me the chance to communicate with some business men in Gloucester and buy her back, but he only laughs at me, and laughs in a way to make me think I was a child. And in one way I was sort of a child, then, but I didn't begin to realize how much of a child till I heard a voice giving orders to make sail on the _Aurora_. A coast steamer had just come in, and from her had come a crew of men to take the _Aurora_ away, and this was the voice of the man who gave me the keg of rum that night in Saint Pierre. And while I was looking at him another man came alongside from the coast steamer, and this was Miller himself. If the _Aurora_ had been within distance I would have jumped aboard; but she had her lower sails up then and was moving in pretty lively fashion out of the harbor. I sat on a rock on the beach to think it over, and, "Alec Corning," I said to myself at last--"they cert'nly tried you with the right kind o' bait--and hooked you good." And I wondered how I could get square with Miller. No use trying to stir up Washington. There was an old skipper of mine, and they'd fined him three thousand dollars once for just a difference of opinion and he couldn't pay it, and his vessel at that moment was being used for a light-ship, and all he'd been getting out of Washington were State Department letters for ten years. And he had cert'nly as much political pull as I had, for I had none. No, no State Department for mine, I says at last, and ships my crew up to John Rose to Folly Cove, telling them to help John with the herring, and to tell him, too, to save the herring for me, that I'd get 'em back to Gloucester some way, and myself takes passage next day on the mail packet to Saint Pierre. It was after dark of Christmas Eve when I landed at Saint Pierre. I went up to Argand's Caffay, a place where all kinds of seafaring people used to go to get a drink and a bite to eat. There were quite a few in there now--French stokers from a steamer or two and half a dozen French man-of-war's men from a French gun-boat that was lying in the harbor, I remember.