“It is tolerable plain, sartain!” exclaimed Ithuel—­“two—­four—­six—­eight—­ten—­all good-looking gold pieces, that in this part of the world you call zecchini—­or sequins, as we name ’em, in English.  What have I done, Signor Squire, or what am I to do for these twenty dollars?  Name your tarms; this working in the dark is ag’in the grain of my natur’!”

“You are to tell the truth; we suspect the lugger of being French; and by putting the proof in our hands, you will make us your friends, and serve yourself.”

Andrea Barrofaldi knew little of America and Americans, but he had imbibed the common European notion that money was the great deity worshipped in this hemisphere, and that all he had to do was to offer a bribe, in order to purchase a man of Ithuel’s deportment and appearance.  In his own island ten sequins would buy almost any mariner of the port to do any act short of positive legal criminality; and the idea that a barbarian of the west would refuse such a sum, in preference to selling his shipmates, never crossed his mind.  Little, however, did the Italian understand the American.  A greater knave than Ithuel, in his own way, it was not easy to find; but it shocked all his notions of personal dignity, self-respect, and republican virtue, to be thus unequivocally offered a bribe; and had the lugger not been so awkwardly circumstanced, he would have been apt to bring matters to a crisis at once by throwing the gold into the vice-governatore’s face; although, knowing where it was to be found, he might have set about devising some means of cheating the owner out of it at the very next instant.  Boon or bribe, directly or unequivocally offered in the shape of money, as coming from the superior to the inferior, or from the corrupter to the corrupted, had he never taken, and it would have appeared in his eyes a species of degradation to receive the first, and of treason to his nationality to accept the last; though he would lie, invent, manage, and contrive, from morning till night, in order to transfer even copper from the pocket of his neighbor to his own, under the forms of opinion and usage.  In a word, Ithuel, as relates to such things, is what is commonly called law-honest, with certain broad salvoes, In favor of smuggling of all sorts, in foreign countries (at home he never dreamed of such a thing), custom-house oaths, and legal trickery; and this is just the class of men apt to declaim the loudest against the roguery of the rest of mankind.  Had there been a law giving half to the informer, he might not have hesitated to betray the lugger, and all she contained, more especially in the way of regular business; but he had long before determined that every Italian was a treacherous rogue, and not at all to be trusted like an American rogue; and then his indomitable dislike of England would have kept him true in a case of much less complicated risk than this.  Commanding himself, however, and regarding the sequins with natural longing, he answered with a simplicity of manner that both surprised and imposed on the vice-governatore.