covery after all. Many of the tins contained amunition to be sure, but as many were filled with the bona-fide beans. They were in fact, in a dilemma. The secret of how the ammunition was being smuggled in had been solved it is true, but to what advantage?

They could not confiscate all the canned beans that arrived without creating endless complications and possible trouble, for it was an utter impossibility to distinguish real beans from powder and shells until the contents were exposed. And it was equally impractical to open every can and thus destroy the contents of those which did not contain contraband. In vain they tried to discover some way of distinguishing between the one and the other. The labels were identical; when shaken, the sounds of the two were indistinguishable, and the clever man who had packed and shipped the ammunition had taken the utmost pains to see that shells and powder were so proportioned as to weigh precisely the same amount as real beans.

And the consigness vowed, by all their innumerable saints, that they knew nothing of the contraband contents of the cans, which may or may not have been true. At any rate, there was no means of proving guilty knowledge or connivance. Worst of all, the Jamaican's accidental discovery came too late to be of any real value, for shipments

of beans dwindled rapidly thereafter, though a perusal of past entries and manifests disclosed the hitherto unnoticed fact that within the preceeding six months more tinned beans had been imported than in six years previously. Evidently the insurrectos had received a nearly adequate stock of beans for their purposes before the stevedore decided to add such delicacies to his menu.

Very soon, too, the "Colorados" " second revolution was in full swing, and with the aid of Don Miguel's "beans" the insurrectos were this time entirely successful.

It was a joke exactly to the old fellow's taste, and he never tired of boasting of how he had outwitted the officials and of chaffing them, until the mere mention of a bean was enough to drive a customs officer into a frenzy. Worst of all there was no come back. Don Miguel was no longer a political refugee, and, as Secretary of War, he was immune and perfectly safe from prosecution. For all I know to the contrary he may still be regaling friends and acquaintances with his narrative. And chuckling with delight as he remarks: "Si, Señor, thus it was, and of a truth, amigo, it was the only war ever won by beans! But, Madre de Dios! What a labor, what a work it is to pack beans! More than ever do I marvel how the Americanos can afford to sell them so cheaply! And think not, amigo, that my part was not as filled with the dan

ger of death as though I had been leading my brave and gallant men upon the battlefield. Aye de mi! Even now do I tremble when I think of standing there and with my own hands soldering the tins of my most precious beans!"

Another odd individual, and in his way as interesting as Don Miguel, was also a West Indian whom I knew very well. This man, however, was a person of color, a native of a British Island, and a man who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge and whose father had left him a vast estate and, for the West Indies, great wealth. Jabez was, however, one of those almost white individuals, who despite every advantage of riches, education and social position, revert through some throw-back of nature to the primitive African type.

He was a moral degenerate, more superstitious than the blacks who worked for and feared him, and was a fanatical devotee of Obeah. But such matters have little to do with the story, aside from the fact that, through his colored and black tenants, he was, despite all his "spells" and "charms" and witchcraft, constantly in fear of someone keeping oft repeated threats of taking his life. In appearance he was as forbidding as he was in character. A physical giant, immensely broad and thick, with a bull-neck and a bullet-head covered with a thatch of coarse black almost straight hair. His mouth

was wide and cruel, his nose broad, his eyes piglike with blood-shot whites, and his lower jaw prognathous. But his manners, when he chose, were those of a highly educated gentleman, and to all visitors or strangers, he was, or pretended to be, the most hospitable of hosts. And his dwelling was as strange as himself. It stood upon a low hill above a bay whence he could gaze across the blue stretch of the Caribbean to the filmy, opalescent outlines of a French Island barely twenty miles distant, and behind his house his estates extended from mountain to mountain or, as the old deeds had it, from "sky-line to sky-line." The house was a veritable castle surrounded with moat and embrasured walls. Only by narrow flights of stone steps commanded by loopholes could it be approached, and local tradition had it that the place had once been the residence of a famous pirate chief. Color was lent to this tale by the fact that the balustrade to the front steps leading to the veranda was composed of ancient musket-barrels and cutlass-blades with sword-hilts for newel-posts, while under the rambling stone edifice, were dark, mysterious stone vaults. Within these it was said the old pirate stored his ill-gotten gold and treasure. But Jabez used them for a very different purpose, although the local customs officials would have said his property within the subterranean chambers was treasure equal to

the corsair chief's, and fully as dishonestly acquired. In other words, Jabez kept his secret storerooms filled with choice liquors on which, there was every reason to suspect, no duty had ever been paid. That Jabez was not above smuggling was a foregone conclusion. He was, in every way, unprincipled, and having dissipated his cash inheritance and allowed his estate to go to wreck and ruin, he needed coin and was not the kind to be squeamish as to how he obtained it. And his home and surroundings were as ideal for a smuggler as for a pirate. A boat could make the run from the neighboring French island in a few hours; smoke signals or lights could even be seen from shore, and the out-of-the-way and almost landlocked bay was a splendid harbor. Moreover, all about were reefs and narrow tortuous channels by which a canoe could steal in unseen, and no cuttoms guards or officers were there to prevent a cargo from being landed whenever the smugglers saw fit.

But despite every effort, Jabez had never been caught, and there was no slightest proof that he ever had a hand in smuggling a penny's worth of anything.

Then one day came a tip from a negro fisherman that on a certain date a batteau, laden with French goods, was to arrive at the bay. Negroes' tips, especially those of blacks who have a grudge, are