‘I!  A spy!’ The tone of my voice was enough to convince him.

‘Well,’ said he,’ I’m darned if I know what you are.  But if you’d been a spy I’d ha’ had no hand in landing you, whatever the skipper might say.’

‘Mind you, I’ve no word to say against Boney,’ said the other seaman, speaking in a very thick rumbling voice.  ’He’s been a rare good friend to the poor mariner.’

It surprised me to hear him speak so, for the virulence of feeling against the new French Emperor in England exceeded all belief, and high and low were united in their hatred of him; but the sailor soon gave me a clue to his politics.

’If the poor mariner can run in his little bit of coffee and sugar, and run out his silk and his brandy, he has Boney to thank for it,’ said he.  ’The merchants have had their spell, and now it’s the turn of the poor mariner.’

I remembered then that Buonaparte was personally very popular amongst the smugglers, as well he might be, seeing that he had made over into their hands all the trade of the Channel.  The seaman continued to pull with his left hand, but he pointed with his right over the slate-coloured dancing waters.

‘There’s Boney himself,’ said he.

You who live in a quieter age cannot conceive the thrill which these simple words sent through me.  It was but ten years since we had first heard of this man with the curious Italian name—­think of it, ten years, the time that it takes for a private to become a non-commissioned officer, or a clerk to win a fifty-pound advance in his salary.  He had sprung in an instant out of nothing into everything.  One month people were asking who he was, the next he had broken out in the north of Italy like the plague; Venice and Genoa withered at the touch of this swarthy ill-nourished boy.  He cowed the soldiers in the field, and he outwitted the statesmen in the council chamber.  With a frenzy of energy he rushed to the east, and then, while men were still marvelling at the way in which he had converted Egypt into a French department, he was back again in Italy and had beaten Austria for the second time to the earth.  He travelled as quickly as the rumour of his coming; and where he came there were new victories, new combinations, the crackling of old systems and the blurring of ancient lines of frontier.  Holland, Savoy, Switzerland—­they were become mere names upon the map.  France was eating into Europe in every direction.  They had made him Emperor, this beardless artillery officer, and without an effort he had crushed down those Republicans before whom the oldest king and the proudest nobility of Europe had been helpless.  So it came about that we, who watched him dart from place to place like the shuttle of destiny, and who heard his name always in connection with some new achievement and some new success, had come at last to look upon him as something more than human, something monstrous, overshadowing France and menacing Europe.  His