Calypso....  She and I, just for fun, sometimes drop into Sweeney’s store, and, when she has made her purchases, she draws up from her bosom a little bag, and, looking softly at me, lays down on the counter—­a golden doubloon; and Sweeney—­who, doubtless, thinks us all a little crazy—­smiles indulgently on our make-believe.

Sometimes, on our way home, we come upon Tom in the plantations, superintending a gang of the “King’s” janissaries—­among whom Erebus is still the blackest—­for Tom is now the Lord High Steward of our estate.  He beams on us in a fatherly way, and I lay my hand significantly on my leftside—­to his huge delight.  He flashes his white teeth and wags his head from side to side with inarticulate enjoyment of the allusion.  For who knows?  He may be right.  In so mysterious a world the smallest cause may lead up to the most august results and there is nothing too wonderful to happen.

EPILOGUE BY THE EDITOR

It remains for me, as sponsor for the foregoing narrative, reluctantly to add a second postscript to that of its author, bringing the fortunes of himself and his friends a little nearer to the present year of grace.  Not that anything untoward has happened to any of them.  Their lives are still lived happily in the sun, and their treasure is still safe—­somewhere carefully out of the sun.  But neither their lives nor their treasure are where my friend’s postscript left them.  They are, indeed, very much nearer New York than at that writing.

As a matter of fact, after King Alcinoues had played but a short time at being the Count of Monte Cristo in his underground palace, it gradually was borne in upon his essentially common-sense mind, as upon the minds of Calypso and her husband, that their secret was known to too many for its absolute safety.  Kindly coloured people indeed, and a very friendly “Secretary to the British Treasury” ... still, there was no knowing, and, on all accounts, they gradually came to the unromantic conclusion that the safe deposit vaults of New York were more reliable than limestone caverns filled with the sound of sea.  This conclusion explains the presence of my friend and his Lady of the Doubloons in the box of the Punch and Judy Theatre that, to me, eventful evening.

Since then, I myself have made a pilgrimage to all the places that play a part in this romance.  I have crawled my way through those caves in which my friend came so near to leaving his bones, looked into those vaults once glittering with pieces of eight and all that other undivulged treasure-trove, wedged myself as far as I dared into that slit in the rocks, looking out like a narrow window on the sea.

All those places are real; any one, with a mind to, can find them; but, should any one care to undertake the pilgrimage, he will note, as I did, that those baronial halls of Edward Teach—­for a while the playground of King Alcinoues—­are rapidly being reclaimed by the savage wilderness, fiercely swallowed minute by minute by the fanged and serpentine vegetation—­which, after all, was only stayed for a moment, and which, humanly speaking, will now submerge them for all eternity.