Let us draw a veil over the scene.
Miss Pritty has been brought to this pass by Mr Charles Hazlit, whose daughter, Aileen, has been taken ill in China. Being a man of unbounded wealth, and understanding that Miss Pritty is a sympathetic friend of his daughter and an admirable nurse, he has written home to that lady requesting her, in rather peremptory terms, to “come out to them.” Miss Pritty, resenting the tone of the request as much as it was in her nature to resent anything, went off instanter, in a gush of tender love and sympathy, and took passage in the first ship that presented itself as being bound for the China seas. She did not know much about ships. Her maritime ideas were vague. If a washing-tub had been advertised just then as being A1 at Lloyds’ and about to put forth for that region of the earth with every possible convenience on board for the delight of human beings, she would have taken a berth in it at once.
We do not intend to inflict Miss Pritty’s voyage on our reader. Suffice it to say that she survived it, reached China in robust health, and found her sick friend,—who had recovered,—in a somewhat similar condition.
After an embrace such as women alone can bestow on each other, Miss Pritty, holding her friend’s hand, sat down to talk. After an hour of interjectional, exclamatory, disconnected, irrelevant, and largely idiotical converse—sustained chiefly by herself—Miss Pritty said:—
“And oh! The pirates!”
She said this with an expression of such awful solemnity that Aileen could not forbear smiling as she asked—
“Did you see any?”
“Gracious! No,” exclaimed Miss Pritty, with a look of horror, “but we heard of them. Only think of that! If I have one horror on earth which transcends all other horrors in horribleness, that horror is—pirates. I once had the misfortune to read of them when quite a girl—they were called Buccaneers, I think, in the book—and I have never got over it. Well, one day when we were sailing past the straits of Malacca,—I think it was,—our captain said they were swarming in these regions, and that he had actually seen them—more than that, had slain them with his own—oh! It is too horrible to think of. And our captain was such a dear good man too. Not fierce one bit, and so kind to everybody on board, especially the ladies! I really cannot understand it. There are such dreadfully strange mixtures of character in this world. No, he did not say he had slain them, but he used nautical expressions which amount to the same thing, I believe; he said he had spiflicated lots of ’em and sent no end of ’em to somebody’s locker. It may be wrong in me even to quote such expressions, dear Aileen, but I cannot explain myself properly if I don’t. It is fearful to know there are so many of them, ‘swarming,’ as our captain said.”
“The worst of it is that many of the boatmen and small traders on the coast,” said Aileen, “are also pirates, or little better.”
“Dreadful!” exclaimed her friend. “Why, oh why do people go to sea at all?”