was administering, and, grinding his teeth, would cry out:  “Won’t ye say naught?  Won’t ye say naught?  Well, then, I’ll see if I can’t make ye say naught.”  When things had reached such a pass as this Molly would generally interfere to protect her foster-son, and then she and Tom would together fight the old man until they had wrenched the stick or the strap out of his hand.  Then old Matt would chase them out-of-doors and around and around the house for maybe half an hour until his anger was cool, when he would go back again, and for a time the storm would be over.

Besides his foster-mother, Tom Chist had a very good friend in Parson Jones, who used to come over every now and then to Abrahamson’s hut upon the chance of getting a half-dozen fish for breakfast.  He always had a kind word or two for Tom, who during the winter evenings would go over to the good man’s house to learn his letters, and to read and write and cipher a little, so that by now he was able to spell the words out of the Bible and the almanac, and knew enough to change tuppence into four ha’pennies.

This is the sort of boy Tom Chist was, and this is the sort of life he led.

In the late spring or early summer of 1699 Captain Kidd’s sloop sailed into the mouth of the Delaware Bay and changed the whole fortune of his life.

And this is how you come to the story of Captain Kidd’s treasure-box.

II

Old Matt Abrahamson kept the flat-bottomed boat in which he went fishing some distance down the shore, and in the neighborhood of the old wreck that had been sunk on the Shoals.  This was the usual fishing-ground of the settlers, and here Old Matt’s boat generally lay drawn up on the sand.

There had been a thunder-storm that afternoon, and Tom had gone down the beach to bale out the boat in readiness for the morning’s fishing.

It was full moonlight now, as he was returning, and the night sky was full of floating clouds.  Now and then there was a dull flash to the westward, and once a muttering growl of thunder, promising another storm to come.

All that day the pirate sloop had been lying just off the shore back of the Capes, and now Tom Chist could see the sails glimmering pallidly in the moonlight, spread for drying after the storm.  He was walking up the shore homeward when he became aware that at some distance ahead of him there was a ship’s boat drawn up on the little narrow beach, and a group of men clustered about it.  He hurried forward with a good deal of curiosity to see who had landed, but it was not until he had come close to them that he could distinguish who and what they were.  Then he knew that it must be a party who had come off the pirate sloop.  They had evidently just landed, and two men were lifting out a chest from the boat.  One of them was a negro, naked to the waist, and the other was a white man in his shirt-sleeves, wearing