CHAPTER XXI
THE STORY OF AARON SMITH
If the expression had not been used already so many
thousand times, one might well say of the following
story that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Had
you read the yarn which is here to be related you would, at
its conclusion, have remarked that it was certainly most
interesting and exciting, but it was too exaggerated, too full
of coincidences, too full of narrow escapes ever to have
occurred in real life. But I would assure the reader at the
outset that Smith's experiences were actual and not fictional,
and that his story was carefully examined at the time by
the High Court of Admiralty. The prelude, the climax
and the conclusion of this drama with its exciting incidents,
its love interest and its happy ending; the romantic atmosphere,
the picturesque characters, the colours and the
symmetry of the narrative are so much in accord with
certain models such as one used to read in mere story-books
of one's boyhood, that it is well the reader should be fully
assured that what is here set forth did in very truth happen.
In some respects the narrative reads like pages from one of
Robert Louis Stevenson's novels, and yet though I have, by
the limits of the space at my disposal, been compelled to
omit many of the incidents which centred around Smith
and his pirate associates, yet the facts which are set forth
