"Wine? Cargo of wine--what's he talking about?" I looks at my crowd,
and they all says: "Wine? Cargo of wine?--he's crazy."

I turns impatiently to the governor and French captain. "Gentlemen, this
is a serious accusation, but easily settled. If there was wine in that
vessel, surely her papers will say something of it. It will be on her
manifest, that is certain."

Now these two, the governor and the French naval officer, were honest
men. "That is so," they said. "He is quite right--quite right," and
looked at Miller, and Miller, with his eyes like door-knobs, looks at
me. And I gives him a wink with my wind'ard eye and he near blew up.

But he begins to see a thing or two, so he goes off with the French
officials, but before we had finished smoking our after-breakfast
pipeful he comes back--alone now--and says: "What do you propose?" And I
said: "Within a thousand miles of here is a friend of mine with a lot of
wine--as good a lot as the _Aurora_ had in her hold yesterday--maybe a
couple of dozen quarts shy--you know, a Christmas dinner, and so on--and
only last night my friend was figuring it up, and he thought there was
twenty thousand dollars' worth in this lot of his, and that without
figuring in the duty--but he don't care for wine much--but he does love
a good Vessel, and he was looking the _Aurora_ over and he said he'd be
willing to exchange all that wine for the _Aurora_. I told him that the
_Aurora_ only cost you twenty-five hundred, but he said, 'No matter, I
have a weakness for the _Aurora_,' this friend of mine. Of course
there'll be a few little extra expenses you'll have to pay for, like the
hawser and the big anchor cut away and the keep of a crew for a week
over in Newfoundland, and so on, but that won't be much--five hundred