“Exactly, and we’ll have to pay the milliners.  That is what bothers me.  I was going to lead this expedition to London, Paris, and New York, admiral.  That is where the money is, and to get it you’ve got to go ashore, to headquarters.  You cannot nowadays find it on the high seas.  Modern civilization,” said Kidd, “has ruined the pirate’s business.  The latest news from the other world has really opened my eyes to certain facts that I never dreamed of.  The conditions of the day of which I speak are interestingly shown in the experience of our friend Hawkins here.  Captain Hawkins, would you have any objection to stating to these gentlemen the condition of affairs which led you to give up piracy on the high seas?”

“Not the slightest, Captain Kidd,” returned Captain Hawkins, who was a recent arrival in Hades.  “It is a sad little story, and it gives me a pain for to think on it, but none the less I’ll tell it, since you ask me.  When I were a mere boy, fellow-pirates, I had but one ambition, due to my readin’, which was confined to stories of a Sunday-school nater—­to become somethin’ different from the little Willies an’ the clever Tommies what I read about therein.  They was all good, an’ they went to their reward too soon in life for me, who even in them days regarded death as a stuffy an’ unpleasant diversion.  Learnin’ at an early period that virtue was its only reward, an’ a-wish-in’ others, I says to myself:  ‘Jim,’ says I, ’if you wishes to become a magnet in this village, be sinful.  If so be as you are a good boy, an’ kind to your sister an’ all other animals, you’ll end up as a prosperous father with fifteen hundred a year sure, with never no hope for no public preferment beyond bein’ made the superintendent of the Sunday-school; but if so be as how you’re bad, you may become famous, an’ go to Congress, an’ have your picture in the Sunday noospapers.’  So I looks around for books tellin’ how to get ‘Famous in Fifty Ways,’ an’ after due reflection I settles in my mind that to be a pirate’s just the thing for me, seein’ as how it’s both profitable an’ healthy.  Passin’ over details, let me tell you that I became a pirate.  I ran away to sea, an’ by dint of perseverance, as the Sunday-school books useter say, in my badness I soon became the centre of a evil lot; an’ when I says to ’em, ’Boys, I wants to be a pirate chief,’ they hollers back, loud like, ’Jim, we’re with you,’ an’ they was.  For years I was the terror of the Venezuelan Gulf, the Spanish Main, an’ the Pacific seas, but there was precious little money into it.  The best pay I got was from a Sunday noospaper, which paid me well to sign an article on ‘Modern Piracy’ which I didn’t write.  Finally business got so bad the crew began to murmur, an’ I was at my wits’ ends to please ’em; when one mornin’, havin’ passed a restless night, I picks up a noospaper and sees in it that ’Next Saturday’s steamer is a weritable treasure-ship, takin’ out twelve million dollars, and the jewels