I had taken notice, in Captain Carton’s boat, that there was a curious and quite new sort of fitting on board.  It was a kind of a little bower made of flowers, and it was set up behind the captain, and betwixt him and the rudder.  Not only was this arbour, so to call it, neatly made of flowers, but it was ornamented in a singular way.  Some of the men had taken the ribbons and buckles off their hats, and hung them among the flowers; others had made festoons and streamers of their handkerchiefs, and hung them there; others had intermixed such trifles as bits of glass and shining fragments of lockets and tobacco-boxes with the flowers; so that altogether it was a very bright and lively object in the sunshine.  But why there, or what for, I did not understand.

Now, as soon as the first bewilderment was over, Captain Carton gave the order to land for the present.  But this boat of his, with two hands left in her, immediately put off again when the men were out of her, and kept off, some yards from the shore.  As she floated there, with the two hands gently backing water to keep her from going down the stream, this pretty little arbour attracted many eyes.  None of the boat’s crew, however, had anything to say about it, except that it was the captain’s fancy.

The captain—­with the women and children clustering round him, and the men of all ranks grouped outside them, and all listening—­stood telling how the Expedition, deceived by its bad intelligence, had chased the light Pirate boats all that fatal night, and had still followed in their wake next day, and had never suspected until many hours too late that the great Pirate body had drawn off in the darkness when the chase began, and shot over to the Island.  He stood telling how the Expedition, supposing the whole array of armed boats to be ahead of it, got tempted into shallows and went aground; but not without having its revenge upon the two decoy-boats, both of which it had come up with, overhand, and sent to the bottom with all on board.  He stood telling how the Expedition, fearing then that the case stood as it did, got afloat again, by great exertion, after the loss of four more tides, and returned to the Island, where they found the sloop scuttled and the treasure gone.  He stood telling how my officer, Lieutenant Linderwood, was left upon the Island, with as strong a force as could be got together hurriedly from the mainland, and how the three boats we saw before us were manned and armed and had come away, exploring the coast and inlets, in search of any tidings of us.  He stood telling all this, with his face to the river; and, as he stood telling it, the little arbour of flowers floated in the sunshine before all the faces there.

Leaning on Captain Carton’s shoulder, between him and Miss Maryon, was Mrs. Fisher, her head drooping on her arm.  She asked him, without raising it, when he had told so much, whether he had found her mother?