They had a clean case against me, and I was taken with the Aurora to Harbor Grace for trial.  When they asked me what I had to say, I told ’em that I was simply bringing a little keg of rum from a man in Saint Pierre to his friend in Auvergne.  They asked me the name of the man in Saint Pierre, and I said I didn’t know.  They asked me the name of the man in Auvergne, and I said I didn’t know.  “Was this the man?” they asks, and shows me the tag on the keg.  I didn’t answer.  And they went on to show there was no man in Auvergne by that name, and what were they to understand by that?

I told them I didn’t know—­it was past me.  And it cert’nly was.  But they knew what to make of it, they said.  There were people in Auvergne doing this illegal business under false names.  And I had used a false name, and to try to tell the honorable court that I did not know the name of the man in Saint Pierre who gave me the rum, nor the man I was bringing it to—­why, I knew very well who gave me the rum, and I knew who I was bringing it to, and if the truth were known, I knew a lot more about the rum-smuggling traffic.  And they were going to put a stop to it.

And they laid a fine of twenty-five hundred dollars against my vessel.  Maybe you might think that a pretty heavy fine, but that’s nothing.  Almost any little local magistrate down that way can soak an American skipper or owner for almost any amount and get away with it.  And how’s that?  Well, we pay two or three dollars a barrel to Newfoundland fishermen for herring.  Before we went down here the St. John’s merchants used to pay them about fifty cents a barrel, and it’s the St. John’s merchants who have all the money and came pretty near running Newfoundland.

Well, when my little local magistrate fines me twenty-five hundred dollars I said I wouldn’t pay it, that I’d stir things up at Washington, and so on, but they only laughed at me, and put her up for sale.

Now I’d ’ve bid her in myself if I’d had the money, but I only had a couple of hundred dollars in cash for running expenses with me.  All my Newfoundland friends down that way were poor people—­fishermen.  If ’twas home we could ‘a’ raised plenty of money on her, but I was in Newfoundland, not Gloucester, and they rushed the thing through.

Well, the Aurora was bid in for just the amount of the fine, and that was a shame, the vessel she was, and she was bid in by a man nobody seemed to know.  I went to the man who bid her in and told him the whole story, of what the vessel meant to me, of how I came to bring the rum over, and asked him would he give me the chance to communicate with some business men in Gloucester and buy her back, but he only laughs at me, and laughs in a way to make me think I was a child.