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New friends had come into his life and welcomed him kindly. He was no longer lonely. As eager as a boy, he ran to the window. He had not been dreaming. In the harbor lay the pretty yacht, the stately, white-hulled war-ship. The flag that drooped from the stern of each caused his throat to tighten, brought warm tears to his eyes, fresh resolve to his discouraged, troubled spirit.

He pulled out his watch dreamily a quarter of six and still but one captive and let his glance follow the wake of a graceful, white-hulled gasoline cruiser which chugged its way up from the south. Presently Silvey returned to break in upon his revery with the exciting news that a man near the life-preserver post had caught five fish. John sat up.

Once clear of the harbour, the skipper rang for full speed; and the Matsuma Maru, a white-hulled, steel-built ship of some four thousand tons, rigged as a topsail schooner, soon showed that she was the possessor of a nimble pair of heels. She was loaded well down, yet an hour after the patent log had been put overboard it recorded a run of seventeen knots.

This spot was eventually found, in the shape of a tiny cove near Point Lucrecia; and into it they steamed at daylight next morning, leaving it again the same evening, an hour before sunset, when the Thetis again showed as the trim, white-hulled English yacht, with all her boats bright varnished as of yore, neither yacht nor boats bearing the slightest trace of ever having been even remotely connected with the mysterious "gunboat" that had been seen by the fishermen to steam out of Sagua la Grande harbour.

Yet still these endless promontories stretched away, till their distant outlines were lost in the soft blue haze of the Indian summer. Yet there was an oppressiveness about the tideless water and pestilential shore, and the white-hulled ships looked like deserted punished things, whose doom for ages was to be ceaseless sailing over these gloomy waters. At Toronto my kind friend Mr. Forrest met me.

With all due observance of the courtesies of the sea the graceful, white-hulled Thetis dipped a farewell salute to the Spanish warships in Havana harbour as she next morning swept past them, outward bound, shortly after nine o'clock in the morning of a glorious April day.

New friends had come into his life and welcomed him kindly. He was no longer lonely. As eager as a boy, he ran to the window. He had not been dreaming. In the harbor lay the pretty yacht, the stately, white-hulled war-ship. The flag that drooped from the stern of each caused his throat to tighten, brought warm tears to his eyes, fresh resolve to his discouraged, troubled spirit.