He said that so slyly that I had to ask him what that way was.  He winked.  “I deal in wines—­what way can it be?” And, of course, I winked back to show that I was a deep one too.  It’s wonderful what things a man c’n get up to wind’ard of you after he’s half filled you up.  Well, no more then, but we left our caffay for a walk around the port, me looking for a little souvenir in the jewelry line for the baby.  Christmas was comin’, and though I didn’t expect to be home till after New Year’s, still I wanted the wife to know I hadn’t forgotten the baby.

I was tellin’ that to Miller, and a little more about them, of how I hadn’t been but a couple of years married, and how I kissed her and the baby good-by on the steps, and her tellin’ me the last thing not to go pilin’ the vessel up on the rocks anywhere, that the baby’s fortune was in her now, and so on.

Well, sir, that farewell scene, that adieu, was too touching for him—­he insisted on picking out the souvenir himself, and he picked out a good one, a pretty brooch to fasten the baby’s little collar, and he paid for it—­forty francs—­and I just had to take it.

Well, we had another drink and parted, me not expecting to see any more of him; but that night as I was down on the dock hailing the vessel for a dory to go aboard, a man stepped up to me and laid his hand on my arm.  “Captain Corning?” he said, and I said yes.

Well, he was a friend of Mr. Miller—­he had seen me talking to Mr. Miller, and learned that I was about to depart in the early morning, bound for Placentia Bay; he would like to ask me to do him a small favor.  Could I take one package and land it on my way to Auvergne, where was one friend of his?  A small matter, one five-gallon keg of rum, that rum which was of such trivial price in Saint Pierre, but on which the duty was so high in Newfoundland, and his friend was one poor man, one fisherman, who could not afford to pay the duty.

Now this Auvergne was twenty-five miles this side of any port of entry, and my first landing in Newfoundland, according to law, had to be at a port of entry.  And so I told this chap that, and how I was liable to a heavy fine, and so on.

Yes, he discerned much truth in what I said, but consider that poor fisherman who could have his good rum merely for the landing—­no other cost, none whatever—­he, a friend of Mr. Miller, was sending it as a gift for the holiday Christmas time.  And that rum—­consider the piteously cold nights hauling the nets when a drink of good rum was so soothing, so grateful, so inspiring.  And a little favor like that—­the Colonial Government would not be—­truly not—­and if I did not take the rum that poor fisherman of Auvergne would have none in its stead.  He could not afford it, the duty was so high—­an impossible duty, as no doubt I knew.