Cuffe being sent into the Gulf of Genoa, shortly after, seized the opportunity to restore the vice-governatore and his friend to their native island.  The fame of their deeds had preceded them, exaggerated, as a matter of course, by the tongue of rumor.  It was understood that the two Elbans were actually in the fight in which Raoul Yvard fell; and, there being no one to deny it, many even believed that Vito Viti, in particular, had killed the corsair with his own hand.  A discreet forbearance on the part of the podesta always kept the matter so completely involved in mystery, that we question if any traveller who should visit the island, even at this day, would be able to learn more than we now tell the reader.  In a word, the podesta, forever after, passed for a hero, through one of those mysterious processes by which men sometimes reach fame; quite as much, perhaps, to their own astonishment as to the surprise of everybody else.

As for Ithuel, he did not appear in America for many years.  When he did return, he came back with several thousand dollars; how obtained no one knew, nor did he choose to enter into particulars.  He now married a widow, and settled in life.  In due time he “experienced religion,” and at this moment is an active abolitionist, a patron of the temperance cause teetotally, and a general terror to evil-doers, under the appellation of Deacon Bolt.

It was very different with the meek, pious, and single-minded Ghita; though one was e’en a Roman Catholic, and the other a Protestant, and that, too, of the Puritan school.  Our heroine had little of this world left to live for.  She continued, however, to reside with her uncle, until his days were numbered; and then she retired to a convent, no so much to comply with any religious superstitions, as to be able to pass her time, uninterrupted, in repeating prayers for the soul of Raoul.  To her latest hour, and she lived until quite recently, did this pure-minded creature devote herself to what she believed to be the eternal welfare of the man who had so interwoven himself with her virgin affections as to threaten, at one time, to disturb the just ascendency of the dread Being who had created her.

THE END