“DEAR SIR,—­I am a dying woman, and shall probably be dead before this reaches you.  The doctor says he cannot give me forty-eight hours.  It is angina pectoris, and I suffer horribly at times.  The yacht you purchased of me is not the Wasp, but the Queen of Sheba.  My husband designed her.  He was a man of some property near Limerick; and he and my son were involved in some of the Irish troubles between 1881 and 1884.  It was said they had joined one of the brotherhoods, and betrayed their oaths.  This I am sure was not true.  But it is certain we had to run for fear of assassination.  After a year in Liverpool we were forced to fly south to Port William, where we brought the yacht and lived for some time in quiet, under our own names.  But we knew this could not last, and had taken measures to escape when need arose.  My husband had chanced, while at Liverpool, upon an old yacht, dismantled and rotting in the Mersey—­but of about the same size as his own and still, of course, upon the register.  He bought her of her owner—­a Mr. Carlingford, and a stranger—­for a very few pounds, and with her—­what he valued far more—­her papers; but he never completed the transfer at the Custom House.  His plan was, if pressed, to escape abroad, and pass his yacht off as the Wasp, and himself as Mr. Carlingford.  All the while we lived at Port William the Queen of Sheba was kept amply provisioned for a voyage of at least three weeks, when the necessity overtook us, quite suddenly—­ the name of a man, MacGuire, in the Visitors’ Book of a small inn at Penleven.  We left Penleven at dusk that evening, and held steadily up the coast until darkness.  Then we turned the yacht’s head, and ran straight across for Morlaix; but the weather continuing fine for a good fortnight (our first night at sea was the roughest in all this time), we changed our minds, cleared Ushant, and held right across for Vigo; thence, after re-victualling, we cruised slowly down the coast and through the Straits, finally reaching Malaga.  There we stayed and had the yacht lengthened.  My husband had sold his small property before ever we came to Port William, and had managed to invest the whole under the name of Carlingford.  There was no difficulty about letters of credit.  At each port on the way we had shown the Wasp’s papers, and used the name of Carlingford; and at Lisbon we read in an English newspaper about the supposed capsizing of the Queen of Sheba.  Still, we had not only to persuade the officials at the various ports that our boat was the Wasp.  We knew that our enemies were harder to delude, and our next step was to make her as unlike the Wasp or the Queen of Sheba as possible.  This we did by lengthening her and altering her rig.  But it proved useless, as I had always feared it would.  The day after we sailed from Malaga, a Spanish-speaking seaman, whom we had hired there as extra hand,