I Forbid the Banns! — page 98: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

88 ‘‘l FORBID THE BANNS!” any criticism of even their most superficial weaknesses— unless the critics were handy in the use of their revolvers. He had never personally known a buccaneer actually dying of a broken heart; but he had certainly heard of one who died after drinking steadily ata gallon jar of Jamaica rum, and that was much the same thing. There’s a difference between a broken heart and anempty rum jar? Well, per- haps, strictly speaking, there is; but the principle is pre- cisely the same. At least after drinking the gallon of rum the buccaneer was just as dead as if his heart had been broken. His chief officer was so jealous of the memory of his commander, he had declared that he had died, not from the direct effects of the spirit, but owing to his mortification on discovering, as he did after a while, that the rum was not neat—that some unprincipled scoundrel had extracted a quart from the jar, which he had filled up with water. His chief officer declared that the shock of this discovery had been too much for his commander. Had he found out who the man was that had played such a trick upon him it might have been too much for the man as well. Yes, con- tinued the captain, buccaneers are not invariably among the most temperate of men. ‘They would be no use what- ever to writers of romances of the sea if they did not drink pretty heavily. Some of them occasionally lapse into sobri- ety, and then they cease to interest anyone. He had once met a buccaneer who had been induced to sign the pledge at atea meeting held in his native village. He kept his pledge too—that was the worst of it. A well-known romance writer had offered him a large keg of the choicest French brandy, almost a year old; it was no use. He remained sober, and:the terror of the Spanish Main—wher- ever that was. After many deeds of appalling bloodshed, people naturally were on the lookout for an instructive death scene in which the man should slowly perish of the ague shakes or something of that sort; but no, he remained Gomichooks.co