THE GERMAN SETTLER. 59 



left in her case — matrimony. Now to warn her that 

 men of her own caste too commonly make but indif- 

 ferent husbands, would have been pubUshing a 

 truism that Miss O'Hagan knew already : against 

 one of the soldiers in the fort, however, there could 

 be at least no such sweeping objection; and among^ 

 all who visited the canteen, none evinced greater 

 relish for snaaps, or appeared altogether so proper a 

 man to her purpose as Carl Ludwig Hantz. 



Whether the man at arms early perceived indi- 

 cations of the melting mood in a certain quarter of 

 the canteen ; or if she was obliged to any one for 

 conveying her soft vows into the barrack yard to 

 him, matters not a whit. The preliminaries were 

 soon settled between themselves, but unluckily this 

 was not all, for the captain of Ludwig's company, 

 and the captain general in St. Croix, and the 

 Lutheran minister of West-end, and more yet, the 

 old mulatto woman at the canteen, all these were to 

 be won over as consenting parties to their espousals. 

 And why not ? although Carl Hantz professed the 

 same w^orldly calling as Love's high priest at Gretna, 

 yet was he by no means the blacksmith. After 

 mature deliberation, therefore, open procedure was 

 announced as impracticable, and their best chance of 

 success seemed to lie in an elopement to one of the 

 British islands. 



The course of true love — it is an old saw — never 

 ran smoothly yet ; there were difficulties in this track 

 also. First Carl Ludwig's discharge was to be 

 bought, she accomplished this by pledging her 

 trinkets with a Creole jew for sixty pieces of eight. 

 That done there remained the terrors of the passage ; 

 Miss O'Hagan, after being sea sick in crossing to 

 St. Thomas' had sworn by a little image of the 

 virgin, once her father's, never again to tempt salt 

 water. But at last they did come over, in spite of 

 her registered vow ; were bound by the island 

 chaplain here as sure as church links can unite ; and 

 then — alas for the denouement. Their honey- 



