One of the best swashbuckling adventures ever written: As for Captain Morgan, he went about his work with the utmost coolness and deliberation imaginable, unbuttoning the waistcoat and the shirt of the man he had murdered with fingers that neither twitched nor shook. There were a gold cross and a bunch of silver medals hung by a whip-cord about the neck of the dead man. This Captain Morgan broke away with a snap, reaching the jingling baubles to Harry, who took them in his nerveless hand and fingers that he could hardly close upon what they held. Howard Pyle was an American illustrator and writer, primarily of books for young audiences. In 1894 he began teaching illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry, and after 1900 founded his own school of art and illustration called the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art. He wrote an original work, Otto of the Silver Hand, in 1888 and also illustrated historical and adventure stories for periodicals such as Harper's Weekly and St. Nicholas Magazine. Pyle travelled to Florence, Italy to study mural painting in 1910, and died there in 1911 of sudden kidney infection.