“But the wine?” shrieks Miller.

“What wine?”

“The wine—­the wine—­her cargo of wine.”

“Wine?  Cargo of wine—­what’s he talking about?” I looks at my crowd, and they all says:  “Wine?  Cargo of wine?—­he’s crazy.”

I turns impatiently to the governor and French captain.  “Gentlemen, this is a serious accusation, but easily settled.  If there was wine in that vessel, surely her papers will say something of it.  It will be on her manifest, that is certain.”

Now these two, the governor and the French naval officer, were honest men.  “That is so,” they said.  “He is quite right—­quite right,” and looked at Miller, and Miller, with his eyes like door-knobs, looks at me.  And I gives him a wink with my wind’ard eye and he near blew up.

But he begins to see a thing or two, so he goes off with the French officials, but before we had finished smoking our after-breakfast pipeful he comes back—­alone now—­and says:  “What do you propose?” And I said:  “Within a thousand miles of here is a friend of mine with a lot of wine—­as good a lot as the Aurora had in her hold yesterday—­maybe a couple of dozen quarts shy—­you know, a Christmas dinner, and so on—­and only last night my friend was figuring it up, and he thought there was twenty thousand dollars’ worth in this lot of his, and that without figuring in the duty—­but he don’t care for wine much—­but he does love a good Vessel, and he was looking the Aurora over and he said he’d be willing to exchange all that wine for the Aurora.  I told him that the Aurora only cost you twenty-five hundred, but he said, ’No matter, I have a weakness for the Aurora,’ this friend of mine.  Of course there’ll be a few little extra expenses you’ll have to pay for, like the hawser and the big anchor cut away and the keep of a crew for a week over in Newfoundland, and so on, but that won’t be much—­five hundred dollars ought to cover it all.”

And Miller gave back the Aurora and paid over the five hundred, and I gave him an order on John Rose for the wine.  And then I took the little baby’s brooch out of my pocket and handed it back to him.

And then I sailed over to Placentia Bay in the Aurora and took twenty-one hundred barrels of herring off John Rose and put out, and, getting the first of a stiff easterly, the Aurora carried it all the way to Gloucester.  And I was home to the wife and baby by New Year’s.  And the baby got a good brooch.  I could afford it.  From the profits of twenty-one hundred barrels of fine fat herring I could well afford it.

I haven’t seen Miller since, but they say he’s shyer than he used to be of simple American fishermen.

>Light-Ship 67

Perrault was the good old Frenchman who kept the general store just across from the Navy Yard gate, and Baldwin was the chief boson’s mate, U.S.N., who commanded the Whist, the little tug which was used as a general utility boat by the Navy Yard people.