very important results, though it served to supply his suspicions with all the additional testimony of the treachery of their characters that could be furnished by evidence so simple as the mere sound of their voices.  As to the words themselves, though the good-man they might well contain treason, he was compelled to acknowledge to himself that it was so artfully concealed as to escape even his acute capacity We leave the reader himself to judge of the correctness of both opinions.

“This is a pretty bight of a basin, Guinea,” observed the white, rolling his tobacco in his mouth and turning his eyes, for the first time in many minutes, from the vessel; “and a spot is it that a man, who lay on a lee-shore without sticks, might be glad to see his craft in.  Now do I call myself something of a seaman, and yet I cannot weather upon the philosophy of that fellow, in keeping his ship in the outer harbour, when he might warp her into this mill-pond in half an hour.  It gives his boats hard duty, dusky S’ip; and that I call making foul weather of fair!”

The negro had been christened Scipio Africanus, by a species of witticism which was much more common to the Provinces than it is to the States of America, and which filled so many of the meaner employments of the country, in name at least, with the counterparts of the philosophers, heroes, poets, and princes of Rome.  To him it was a matter of small moment, whether the vessel lay in the offing or in the port; and, without discontinuing his childish amusement, he manifested the same, by replying, with great indifference of manner,—­

“I s’pose he t’ink all the water inside lie on a top.”

“I tell you, Guinea,” returned the other, in a harsh, positive tone, “the fellow is a know-nothing!  Would any man, who understands the behaviour of a ship, keep his craft in a roadstead, when he might tie her, head and stern, in a basin like this?”

“What he call roadstead?” interrupted the negro, seizing at once, with the avidity of ignorance, on the little oversight of his adversary, in confounding the outer harbour of Newport with the wilder anchorage below, and with the usual indifference of all similar people to the more material matter of whether the objection was at all germain to the point in controversy; “I never hear ’em call anchoring ground, with land around it, roadstead afore!”

“Hark ye, mister Gold-coast,” muttered the white, bending his head aside in a threatening manner, though he still disdained to turn his eyes on his humble adversary, “if you’ve no wish to wear your shins parcelled for the next month, gather in the slack of your wit, and have an eye to the manner in which you let it run again.  Just tell me this; isn’t a port a port? and isn’t an offing an offing?”

As these were two propositions to which even the ingenuity of Scipio could raise no objection, he wisely declined touching on either, contenting himself with shaking his head in great self-complacency, and laughing as heartily, at his imaginary triumph over his companion, as though he had never known care, nor been the subject of wrong and humiliation, so long and so patiently endured.