64 What Birds Have Done With Me 



starving minds were veritable "apples of Sodom." 

 They were read by everybody, often read aloud 

 so they could be quickly passed on to the next 

 eager lot of readers; and their lurid pirate stories 

 fixed themselves in the minds of the juvenile list- 

 eners to their very great harm. Perhaps some of 

 them never forgot them, and at least one small 

 boy had good reason to remember the worst of 

 them if there are degrees of iniquity in pirate 

 stories all the days of his life. 



Captain Ludlow, of "The Sure Death," was a 

 monster, capable of such frightful atrocities that 

 even the devil would have done himself credit to 

 have disowned him as a subject. There was no 

 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde about him, though at 

 times having the mien of a perfect gentleman, he 

 was always consistent, always the fiend incarnate. 

 It could never be said of him that he did not care 

 a hang for humanity for his ambition seemed 

 to be to hang the whole human family. He had 

 a commendable pride in the originality of his 

 treatment of captives; he had forced none of 

 them to walk the plank that was old-fashioned 

 when he came upon deck so all that fell into 

 his hands had been given their exit from a world 

 of trouble through the hangman's noose. 



Of course always excepting himself and his first 

 and second mates, Guzzling Jack and Gorging 

 Jimmy, English Bone, a gaunt miscreant, was a 



