How am I to describe these things? A discoloured Nelson tall as a thumb, commanding the combined fleets in a cocked hat, on a large seal on which was graved Trafalgar. A little Napoleon in dull ivory on a massive gold seal with indistinguishable initials. Very old rings, very old gold spoons—but this is not an auctioneer's catalogue. Hardy locked everything up.
"Julia's and mine," said he, laughing softly; by which he meant the value of the salvage of the precious fal-lals.
He restored the ring of keys to the desk at which he glanced with a reverential eye, for he saw a little packet of letters in faded ink, and he knew that there too lay in a little circular box small curls of the hair of the dead—the wife and the little drummer. The captain had shown them to him, and the hair was the boy's when two years old. Hardy looked at the drum, at the little bed, at the medicine-chest, at the little clothes hanging at the bulkhead, and stepped out with a sigh, thinking in a sort of blind way about the mercy of God, the sufferings of madness, and the death of little children.
"Have you found any jewels?" asked Julia, as she stood at the wheel.
"More than you could wear, my dear," he answered, "if you were as many-limbed and many-headed as an Indian god."
"Are they worth much?"
"I am not a pawnbroker," he answered; "besides, I have been looking at the little drum and it has drummed the jewelry out of my head."
"For whom were the jewels intended?"
"There is always a market for trash of that sort in the Colonies," he replied.