22 
DOTTING S ON THE ROADSIDE. [Chap. II— B. S. 
tails, giving greater effect to his declamation by violent 
gesticulation. He wound up by describing the pirates 
disturbed by a man-of-war heaving in sight, the rovers 
rushing on board their own ship, making all sail, and 
wetting them to draw better. “You can’t catch her,” 
he exclaimed, accompanied by derisive laughs; “the 
little schooner is too fast for you; we are safe.” After 
uttering the words “we are safe” he fell back into 
his chair, apparently quite exhausted, and did not 
speak another word that night. I have seen much 
good acting, but never in my life anything equal to 
what I saw that night. It would have made the re¬ 
putation of any stage-player, if he could have repro¬ 
duced that scene before a critical audience. Naturally 
we thought that an overdose of wine had prompted 
our host to recite for our entertainment a scene from 
some old, to us unknown, play; and we should have 
gone away with that opinion, complimenting him on 
his excellent recital but next morning, just at dawn, 
there was a knock at our bedroom door. To our sur¬ 
prise it was our host’s wife, wishing to extract from 
us the promise not to mention to any one whilst her 
husband was alive the strange scene we had witnessed 
the night before. The man is long since dead; but 
I still keep a present he made me when we were 
about to start. It was carefully made up in a parcel, 
which, when afterwards opened on the road, was 
found to contain a copy of c The History of the Bucca¬ 
neers of America,’ 8vo, London, 1699, in the binding 
of the period. The book had evidently been much 
used, and often shifted hands. One of the endorse- 
