I gave them the whole story, much as I had told it in John Saunders’s snuggery—­John P. Tobias, Jr.; dear old Tom and his sucking fish, his ghosts, sharks, skeletons, and all; and when I had finished, I found that the interest of my story was once more chiefly centred in my pock-marked friend of “The wonderful works of God.”

“I should like to meet your pock-marked friend,” said King Alcinoues, “and I have a notion that, with you as a bait, I shall not long be denied the pleasure.”

“I am inclined to think that I have seen him already,” said Calypso, using her honey-golden voice for the base purpose of mentioning him.

“Impossible!” I cried, “he is long since safe in Nassau gaol.”

“O! not lately,” she answered to our interrogative surprise, and giving a swift embarrassed look at her father, which I at once connected with the secret of the doubloons.

“Seriously, Calypso?” asked her father, with a certain stern affection, as thinking of her safety.  “On one of your errands to town?”

And then, turning to me, he said: 

“Sir Ulysses, you have spoken well, and your speech has been that free, open-hearted speech that wins its way alike among the Hyperboreans that dwell in frozen twilight near the northern star, and those dwarfed and swarthy intelligences that blacken in the fierce sunlight of that fearful axle we call the equator.  Therefore, I will make return to you of speech no less frank and true ...”

He took a puff at his cigar, and then continued: 

“I should not risk this confession, but that it is easy to see that you belong to the race of Eternal Children, to which, you may have realised, my daughter and I also belong.  This adventure of yours after buried treasure has not seriously been for the doubloons and pieces of eight, the million dollars, and the million and a half dollars themselves, but for the fun of going after them, sailing the unknown seas, coral islands, and all that sort of blessed moonshine.  Well, Calypso and I are just like that, and I am going to tell you something exciting—­we too have our buried treasure.  It is nothing like so magnificent in amount as yours, or your Henry P. Tobias’s—­and where it is at this particular moment I know as little as yourself.  In fact it is Calypso’s secret....”

I looked across at Calypso, but her eyes were far beyond capture, in un-plummeted seas.

“I will show you presently where I found it, among the rocks near by—­now a haunt of wild bees.

“Can you ever forget that passage in the Georgics?  It makes the honey taste sweeter to me every time I taste it.  We must have some of it for dinner, by the way, Calypso.”

I could not help laughing, and so, for a moment, breaking up the story.  The dear fellow!  Was there any business of human importance from which he could not be diverted by a quotation from Homer or Virgil or Shakespeare?  But he was soon in the saddle again.