his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it.
Enough to keep her comfortable. George Dunbar's half, as Cloete

feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the
medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to

go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.
"I am curious," I said, "to learn what the motive force of this

tragic affair was - I mean the patent medicine. Do you know?"
He named it, and I whistled respectfully. Nothing less than

Parker's Lively Lumbago Pills. Enormous property! You know it;
all the world knows it. Every second man, at least, on this globe

of ours has tried it.
"Why!" I cried, "they missed an immense fortune."

"Yes," he mumbled, "by the price of a revolver-shot."
He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States,

passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock. The night before he
sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for

a drink. "Funny chap, Cloete. We sat all night drinking grogs,
till it was time for him to go on board."

It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this
story, with that utterly unconsciousfrankness of a patent-medicine

man stranger to all moral standards. Cloete concluded by remarking
that he, had "had enough of the old country." George Dunbar had

turned on him, too, in the end. Cloete was clearly somewhat
disillusioned.

As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End
hospital or other, and on his last day clamoured "for a parson,"

because his conscience worried him for killing an innocent man.
"Wanted somebody to tell him it was all right," growled my old

ruffian, contemptuously. "He told the parson that I knew this
Cloete who had tried to murder him, and so the parson (he worked

among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about it. That skunk of
a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . . Promised to

be good and so on. . . Then he went crazy . . . screamed and threw
himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can

guess all that - eh? . . . till he was exhausted. Gave up. Threw
himself down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray. So he says.

Tried to think of some prayer for a quick death - he was that
terrified. Thought that if he had a knife or something he would

cut his throat, and be done with it. Then he thinks: No! Would
try to cut away the wood about the lock. . . He had no knife in his

pocket. . . he was weeping and calling on God to send him a tool of
some kind when suddenly he thinks: Axe! In most ships there is a

spare emergency axe kept in the master's room in some locker or
other. . . Up he jumps. . . Pitch dark. "Pulls at the drawers to

find matches and, groping for them, the first thing he comes upon -
Captain Harry's revolver. Loaded too. He goes perfectly quiet all

over. Can shoot the lock to pieces. See? Saved! God's
providence! There are boxes of matches too. Thinks he: I may

just as well see what I am about.
"Strikes a light and sees the little canvas bag tucked away at the

back of the drawer. Knew at once what that was. Rams it into his
pocket quick. Aha! says he to himself: this requires more light.

So he pitches a lot of paper on the floor, set fire to it, and
starts in a hurry rummaging for more valuables. Did you ever? He

told that East-End parson that the devil tempted him. First God's
mercy - then devil's work. Turn and turn about. . .

"Any squirming skunk can talk like that. He was so busy with the
drawers that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens.

He looks up and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in
the lock) and Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce

in the light of the burning papers. His eyes were starting out of
his head. Thieving, he thunders at him. A sailor! An officer!

No! A wretch like you deserves no better than to be left here to
drown.

"This Stafford - on his death-bed - told the parson that when he
heard these words he went crazy again. He snatched his hand with

the revolver in it out of the drawer, and fired without aiming.
Captain Harry fell right in with a crash like a stone on top of the

burning papers, putting the blaze out. All dark. Not a sound. He
listened for a bit then dropped the revolver and scrambled out on

deck like mad."
The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.

"What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people
the captain committed suicide. Pah! Captain Harry was a man that

could face his Maker any time up there, and here below, too. He
wasn't the sort to slink out of life. Not he! He was a good man

down to the ground. He gave me my first job as stevedore only
three days after I got married."

As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide
seemed to be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively

for his material. And then it was not worth many thanks in any
case.

For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in
our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious

continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo. This story to
be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South

Seas. But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the
consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak -

just as it was told to me - but unfortunately robbed of the
striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that

ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port
of London.

Oct. 1910.
THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES - A FIND

This tale, episode, experience - call it how you will - was related
in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own

confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad
age - unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by

the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game
is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to

remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to
be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence,

most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves.
Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed

the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite
forms, fascinating if you like, but - so to speak - naked, stripped

for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the
immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of

thing, under the gathering shadows.
I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man

to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder
of his posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because

the experience was simply that of an abominablefright - terror he
calls it. You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in

the very first lines was in writing.
This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title. The

title itself is my own contrivance, (can't call it invention), and
has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here.

As to the witches that's merely a conventional expression, and we
must take our man's word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street
which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last

stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least
twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very

small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some
premonition of that fact which made me say: "But I must have the

box too." The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic
gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my
curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was

not attractive at first sight. But in one place the statement that
in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye.

Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily
reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being

weak and the power of imagination strong.
In another place the phrase: "At night we stood in again,"

arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. "Let's
see what it is all about," I thought, without excitement.