But--as might have been expected--the poor boy's moral sense had proved as shaky as his intellectual powers.

He had just taken a fancy to some goods of his master's; and had retreated, to enjoy them the more securely, into the southern forests, with a couple of brown policemen on his track.

So he was likely to undergo a more simple investigation than that which was submitted to my analysis, viz.

how he proposed to wash the salt out of the sugar.
We arrived after a while at Valencia, a scattered hamlet in the woods, with a good shop or 'store' upon a village green, under the verandah whereof lay, side by side with bottled ale and biscuit tins, bags of Carapo {265} nuts; trapezoidal brown nuts--enclosed originally in a round fruit--which ought some day to form a valuable article of export.

Their bitter anthelminthic oil is said to have medicinal uses; but it will be still more useful for machinery, as it has--like that curious flat gourd the Sequa {266a}--the property of keeping iron from rust.