For a day and a night they had chased him, when off Cape St. Vincent at about six a.m.  Shard took that step that decided his retirement from active life, he turned for the Mediterranean.  Had he held on Southwards down the African coast it is doubtful whether in face of the interference of England, Russia, France, Denmark and Spain, he could have made piracy pay; but in turning for the Mediterranean he took what we may call the penultimate step of his life which meant for him settling down.  There were three great courses of action invented by Shard in his youth, upon which he pondered by day and brooded by night, consolations in all his dangers, secret even from his men, three means of escape as he hoped from any peril that might meet him on the sea.  One of these was the floating island that the Book of Wonder tells of, another was so fantastic that we may doubt if even the brilliant audacity of Shard could ever have found it practicable, at least he never tried it so far as is known in that tavern by the sea in which I glean my news, and the third he determined on carrying out as he turned that morning for the Mediterranean.  True he might yet have practised piracy in spite of the step that he took, a little later when the seas grew quiet, but that penultimate step was like that small house in the country that the business man has his eye on, like some snug investment put away for old age, there are certain final courses in men’s lives which after taking they never go back to business.

He turned then for the Mediterranean with the English fleet behind him, and his men wondered.

What madness was this,—­muttered Bill the Boatswain in Old Frank’s only ear, with the French fleet waiting in the Gulf of Lyons and the Spaniards all the way between Sardinia and Tunis:  for they knew the Spaniards’ ways.  And they made a deputation and waited upon Captain Shard, all of them sober and wearing their costly clothes, and they said that the Mediterranean was a trap, and all he said was that the North wind should hold.  And the crew said they were done.

So they entered the Mediterranean and the English fleet came up and closed the straits.  And Shard went tacking along the Moroccan coast with a dozen frigates behind him.  And the North wind grew in strength.  And not till evening did he speak to his crew, and then he gathered them all together except the man at the helm, and politely asked them to come down to the hold.  And there he showed them six immense steel axles and a dozen low iron wheels of enormous width which none had seen before; and he told his crew how all unknown to the world his keel had been specially fitted for these same axles and wheels, and how he meant soon to sail to the wide Atlantic again, though not by the way of the straits.  And when they heard the name of the Atlantic all his merry men cheered, for they looked on the Atlantic as a wide safe sea.