“I merely wished to remind you that you had another messmate,” cavalierly returned the other.

“Will you take a cut, brother?” said the seaman, offering the bag, with the liberality of a sailor, the moment he fancied there was an indirect demand made on its contents.

“You still mistake my meaning; on the wharf you had another companion.”

“Ay, ay; he is in the offing there, overhauling that bit of a light-house, which is badly enough moored unless they mean it to shew the channel to your ox-teams and inland traders; hereaway, gentlemen, where you see that pile of stones which seems likely to be coming down shortly by-the-run.”

The stranger looked in the direction indicated by the other, and saw the young mariner, to whom he had alluded, standing at the foot of a ruined tower, which was crumbling under the slow operations of time, at no great distance from the place where he stood.  Throwing a handful of small change to the seamen, he wished them a better meal, and crossed the fence, with an apparent intention of examining the ruin also.

“The lad is free with his coppers,” said Dick, suspending the movements of his teeth, to give the stranger another and a better look; “but, as they will not grow where he has planted them, S’ip, you may turn them over to my pocket.  An off-handed and a free-handed chap that, Africa; but then these law-dealers get all their pence of the devil, and they are sure of more, when the shot begins to run low in the locker.”

Leaving the negro to collect the money, and to transfer it, as in duty bound, to the hands of him who, if not his master, was at all times ready and willing to exercise the authority of one, we shall follow the stranger in his walk toward, the tottering edifice.  There was little about the ruin itself to attract the attention of one who, from his assertions, had probably often enjoyed the opportunities of examining far more imposing remains of former ages, on the other side of the Atlantic.  It was a small circular tower, which stood on rude pillars, connected by arches, and might have been constructed, in the infancy of the country, as a place of defence, though it is far more probable that it was a work of a less warlike nature.  More than half a century after the period of which we are writing, this little edifice, peculiar in its form, its ruinous condition, and its materials, has suddenly become the study and the theme of that very learned sort of individual the American antiquarian.  It is not surprising that a ruin thus honoured should have become the object of many a hot and erudite discussion.  While the chivalrous in the arts and in the antiquities of the country have been gallantly breaking their lances around the mouldering walls, the less instructed and the less zealous have regarded the combatants with the same species of wonder as they would have manifested had they been present when the renowned knight of La Mancha tilted against those other wind-mills so ingeniously described by the immortal Cervantes.