The boy of whom we have spoken was a noble child, frank and manly in his bearing, and evidently deeply interested in the maritime scene before him.  Now he paused to watch the throng of craft of every nation that lay at anchor in the harbor, or which were moored; after the fashion here, with their stems to the quay, and now his fine blue eye wandered off over the swift running waters of the Gulf Stream, watching for a moment the long, heavy swoop of some distant seafowl, or the white sail of some clipper craft bound up the Gulf to New Orleans, or down the narrow channel through the Caribbean Sea to some South American port.  The old don seemed in the meantime to regard the boy with an earnest pride, and scarcely heeded at all the bright sallies of wit that his daughter was so freely and merrily bestowing upon her two assiduous admirers.

“Yonder brigantine must be a slaver,” said the boy, pointing to a rakish craft that seemed to be struggling against the current to the southward.

“Most like, most like; but what does she on this side? the southern shore is her ground, and the Isle of Pines is a hundred leagues from here,” said the old don.

“She has lost her reckoning, probably,” said the boy, “and made the first land to the north.  Lucky she didn’t fall in with those Florida wreckers, for though the Americans don’t carry on the African trade nowadays, they know what to do with a cargo if it gets once hard and fast on the reefs.”

“What know you of these matters?” asked the old don, turning a curious eye on the boy.

“O, I hear them talk of these things, and you know I saw a cargo ‘run’ on the south side only last month,” continued the boy.  “There were three hundred or more filed off from that felucca, two by two, to the shore.”

“It is a slaver,” said one of the officers, “a little out of her latitude, that’s all.”

“A beautiful craft,” said the lady, earnestly; “can it be a slaver, and so beautiful.”

“They are clipper-built, all of them,” said the old don.  “Launched in Baltimore, United States.”

Senorita Gonzales was the daughter of the proud old don of the same name, who was of the party on the Plato at the time we describe.  The father was one of the richest as well as noblest in rank of all the residents of the island, being of the old Castilian stock, who had come from Spain many years before, and after holding high office, both civil and military, under the crown, had at last retired with a princely fortune, and devoted himself to the education of his daughter and son, both of whom we have already introduced to the reader.

The daughter, beautiful, intelligent, and witty to a most extraordinary degree, had absolutely broken the hearts of half the men of rank on the island; for though yet scarcely twenty years of age, Senorita Isabella was a confirmed coquette.  It was her passion to command and enjoy a devotion, but as to ever having in the least degree cherished or known what it was to love, the lady was entirely void of the charge; she had never known the tenderness of reciprocal affection, nor did it seem to those who knew her best, that the man was born who could win her confidence.