CHAPTER I.

ON a fine March evening some five years ago there sat, in the bay window of an old-fashioned Greenwich hostelry, two men who were pondering deeply over a confused mass of charts and plans that lay before them. The redly-setting sun flashed upon the bosom of the river, with its picturesque mass of shipping and masts like grey needles pointing to the sky, an flooded the low-roofed oak-panelled room, in which the men were seated, with a golden glory. They had the apartment quite to themselves, no other feet disturbed the sanded floor, and no maritime reveller disturbed the hallowed sanctuary of the place.

Concerning the quiet beauty of the scene, the flashing, winding river melting away into the golden horizon, the two men saw or cared nothing. The older of the twain had the air and manner of one born to the sea, his hard, rugged face was bronzed by a thousand gales, his bright blue eyes were keen and fearless, and his white hair seemed almost out of place on a man whose frame was as muscular and powerful as it had been five-and-twenty years before. Tom Armstrong, generally known by the generic title of Captain Armstrong, might have boasted, had he been a boasting man, that there was no quarter of the globe unfamiliar to him. For nearly five years he had given up the sea and lived retired on a small competency he had amassed, devoting his time to scientific pursuits, of which he was passionately fond. Very few people knew the extent of his knowledge in this direction, and few people were aware of the really startling discoveries that lay dormant in that magnificent old sea lion's head.

Armstrong's companion, Harold Coventry by name, was a young man somewhere about six-and-twenty years of age. Like his companion, the sea was his passion, and, whilst being anything but a well-to-do man, he contrived to maintain a small yacht, in which he had penetrated into every sea. His friendship with Armstrong was a long one, and from him he had derived all his knowledge of seamanship, a craft to which he had taken by instinct, for Coventry belonged to a famous old naval family, whose name had been a powerful one from the days of Elizabeth onwards. More than one Coventry had found his way to fortune on the Spanish Main in company with Drake and Frobisher and Martin. But a long course of adventuring and reckless plundering in search of excitement had had its effect and now the last of the Coventrys had nothing remaining to him besides the record of family glory by sea, an income of some three hundred pounds yearly, and a