To all this the two functionaries listened with profound attention and a lively surprise.  After looking at each other several times, and exchanging significant gestures, Andrea assumed the office of explaining.

“There is some extraordinary mistake in this, Signor Tenente,” he said; “for Raoul Yvard still lives.  He passed this promontory just as day dawned, in his lugger, this very morning!”

“Aye, he has got that notion from having seen the fellow we fell in with off the harbor here,” answered Cuffe, when this speech was translated to him; “and I don’t wonder at it, for the two vessels were surprisingly alike.  But the barone that we saw burned with our own eyes, Griffin, can never float again.  I say barone; for, in my opinion, the Few-Folly was just as much of a rascal as her commander and all who sailed in her.”

Griffin explained this; but it met with no favor from the two Italians.

“Not so, Signor Tenente—­not so,” returned the vice-governatore; “the lugger that passed this morning, we know to be le Feu-Follet, inasmuch as she took one of our own feluccas, in the course of the night, coming from Livorno and Raoul Yvard permitted her to come in, as he said to her padrone, on account of the civil treatment he had received while lying in our port.  Nay, he even carried his presumption so far as to send me, by means of the same man, the compliments of ‘Sir Smees,’ and his hopes of being able some day to make his acknowledgments in person.”

The English Captain received this intelligence as might be expected; and unpleasant as it was, after putting various questions to the vice-governatore and receiving the answers, he was obliged, unwillingly enough, to believe it all.  He had brought his official report in his pocket; and as the conversation proceeded, he covertly tore it into fragments so small that even a Mahommedan would reject them as not large enough to write the word “Allah” on.

“It’s d—­d lucky, Griffin, that letter didn’t get to Leghorn this morning,” he said, after a long pause.  “Nelson would have Bronted me famously had he got it!  Yet I never believed half as devoutly in the twenty-nine articles as—­”

“I believe there are thirty-nine of them, Captain Cuffe,” modestly put in Griffin.

“Well, thirty-nine, if you will—­what signifies ten, more or less, in such matters?  A man is ordered to believe them all, if there were a hundred.  But I never believed in them as devoutly as I believed in the destruction of that infernal picaroon.  My faith is unsettled for life!”

Griffin offered a few words of condolence, but he was also too much mortified to be very able to administer consolation.  Andrea Barrofaldi, understanding the state of the case, now interposed with his courtesies, and the two officers were invited to share his bachelor’s breakfast.  What followed, in consequence of this visit, and the communications to which it gave rise, will appear in the course of the narrative.