as well stay with McMurtagh, for the present at any rate.

But that "present" was long in passing; for the pirates were duly tried, and all but one of them found guilty, sentenced to be hanged, and duly executed on an island in the harbor. There were no sentimentalists about in those days; and their gibbets were erected in the sand of that harbor island, and their bodies swung for many days (as these same sentimentalists might now put it) near the sea they had loved so well; being a due encouragement to other pirates to leave Boston ships alone. Pity the town has not kept up those tactics with its railways!

All the common seamen were executed, that is, and Manuel Silva, the second in command, who had left the little girl with McMurtagh. The captain, it was proved, had been polite to his two lady captives: the men safely disposed of, he had placed the best cabin at their command, and had even gone so far out of his way as to head the ship toward Boston, on their behalf; promising to place them on board some fishing-smack, not too far out. Silva had not agreed to this, and it had led to something like a mutiny on the part of the crew. It was owing to this, doubtless, that they were captured. De Soto, it was known, was a married man; moreover, he was new in command, and not used to pirate ways.

However, this conduct was deemed courteous by the administration at Washington, and, feminine influence being always potent with Andrew Jackson, De Soto's sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life; and shortly after, being taken to a quiet little country prison, he made interest with the jailer and escaped. It was reported that he shipped upon an African trader; and, going down the harbor past the figure of Manuel Silva elegantly outlined against the sky, he bowed sardonically to the swaying schema of his ancient messmate. It excited some little comment on the African trader at the time; but the usual professional esprit de corps keeps sailors from asking too many questions about the intimate professional conduct of their messmates in earlier voyages.

But that is why De Soto made no draft upon the credit side of his account at the Old Colony Bank; and James Bowdoin's Sons continued to carry the deposit on their books "for the benefit of whom it may concern." And so McMurtagh, who had taken little Mercedes Silva home that day, continued to make a home for her there, his old mother and his father aiding and abetting him in the task; and he carried her young life, in addition to his other burdens, "for the benefit of whom it may concern."

"Whom it may concern" is too old a story, in such cases, ever to be thought of by the actors in them.

VI.

James McMurtagh was one of that vast majority of men who live, function, work, in their appointed way, and are never heard from, like a good digestion. This is the grand division which separates them from those who, be it for good or evil, or weakness even, will be protagonists. Countless multitudes of such men as Jamie must there be, to hold the fabric together and make possible the daring spins of you, my lords Lovelace, and you, Launcelots and Tristrams, and Miss Vivien here; who weave your paradoxical cross-purposes of tinsel evil in the sober woof of good.

No one knew, or if he knew remembered, what was Jamie's age. When he was first taken in by the house, he described himself as a "lad;" but others had not so described him, or else had taken the word as the Scotch, not for English youth, but for male humanity,—wide enough to include a sober under-clerk of doubtful age. Jamie's father had been a drayman, in the employ of the house, as we have said, until his middle was bisected by that three-inch tire weighted with six puncheons of Jamaica rum.

Jamie had been brought over from Scotland when veritably young,—some months or so; had then been finished in the new-fangled American free schools, and had come up in the counting-room, the day of the accident, equipped to feed his broken-backed father, with knowledge enough to be a bookkeeper, and little enough pride to be a messenger. Only, he had no spirit of adventure to fit him for a supercargo,—even that brushed too close upon the protagonist for him; and so he stayed upon his office stool. While other clerks went away promoted, he ticked off his life in alternation from the counting-room to the bank; trustworthy on that well-taught street with any forms of other people's fortunes, only not to make his own, and even trustworthy, as we have seen it go unquestioned, with this little Spanish girl.

Jamie took her home to his parents, and for his sake they fell down and worshiped; with them she lived. The father had had too much rum upon him to care much for the things remaining in this life; after such excessive external application, who could blame him for using it internally more than most? The mother's marital affection, naturally, was moderated by long practice of mixing him hot tumblers with two lumps of sugar, and of seeing the thing administered more dear to her spouse than the ministering angel. But the mother worshiped Jamie, and Jamie worshiped the little girl; and the years went by.

It was pretty to see Jamie and his mother and the little girl walking to church of a Sunday, and funny to hear Jamie's excuses for it afterward.

"'Tis the women bodies need it," said he to Mr. James Bowdoin, who rallied him thereupon.

"But surely, Jamie," said Mr. James, "you, who have read Hume until you've half convinced us all to be free-thinkers,—you'd have your daughter as well educated as yourself?"

"Hersel'," said Jamie, meaning himself,—"hersel' may go to ta deevil if he wull; ta little lassie sall be a lady." (Jamie's Scotch always grew more Gaelic as he got excited.) It was evident that he regarded religion as a sort of ornament of superior breeding, that Mercedes must have, though he could do without it. And Mr. James Bowdoin looked in Jamie's eye, and held his peace. In those days deference was rigidly exacted in the divers relations of life: a disrespectful word would have caused McMurtagh's quick dismissal, and the Bowdoins, father and son, would have been made miserable thereby.

"The lad must have his way with the little girl," said Mr. Bowdoin (now promoted to that title by his father's recent death).

"It seems so," said Mr. James Bowdoin (our Mr. James), who by this time had his own little girls to look after.

"Bring the poor child down to Nahant next time you come to spend the day, and give her a chance to play with the children."

VII.

James McMurtagh, with "the old man" and "the mother," lived in a curious little house on Salem Street, at the North End. Probably they liked it because it might have been a little house in some provincial town at home. To its growing defects of neighborhood they were oblivious. It was a square two-story brick box: on the right of the entry, the parlor, never used before, but now set apart for Mercedes; behind, a larger square room, which was dining-room and kitchen combined, and where the McMurtaghs, father and son, were wont to sit in their shirt-sleeves after supper and smoke their pipes; above were four tiny bedrooms.

Within the parlor the little lady, as Jamie already called her, was given undisputed sway; and a strange transmogrification there she made. The pink shells were collected from the mantel, and piled, with others she had got, to represent a grotto, in one corner of the room; the worked samplers were thought ugly, and banished upstairs. In another