——-

[*] This was written before the "Pay Bill" was passed.



CHAPTER XXX.

OLD FRIENDS.

"What though when storms our bark assail, The needle trembling veers, When night adds horror to the gale, And not a star appears? True to the pole as I to thee, It faithful still will prove— An emblem dear of constancy, And of a sailor's love."

The barge left the side of the frigate, a broad blue pennant with white stars on a staff at her bow, with fourteen handsome sailors to man her, all in clean white frocks and trowsers, with straw hats and flowing black ribbons around them, on which was stamped in gold letters, "Monongahela."

The double bank of white ash oars flashed in the rippling waves of the harbor as the barge was urged over the water, the current seething and buzzing under her bows, and bubbling into her wake as she flew on toward the town. In a mahogany box at the stern sat a bushy-whiskered coxswain, whose body swayed to the stroke of the oars, while his hand grasped the brass tiller as he steered amid the shipping. The commodore had settled himself down under the boat's awning on the snow-white covered cushions in the stern-sheets, and, with one foot resting on the elegant ash grating beneath, he began to talk to the grave gentleman who sat opposite to him.

"It is many a long year since I last visited this superb harbor, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. You never were here before, I think? No? Well, if any of the old set I once knew, when I was first lieutenant of the old 'Scourge,' are yet alive, we shall have a pleasant time!"

"One fine fellow," went on the commodore, "I know is. His name is Piron. I had a note from him as soon as the frigate anchored yesterday, and I shall ask him to dine sociably with me on board this evening. I hope you will join us."

The grave gentleman said that he had business which would detain him on shore all night.

The barge swept up to the mole, the oars were thrown up at a wave of the coxswain's hand, and came into the boat on either side like shutting up a pair of fans, while the boat-hooks checked her way, and she remained stationary at the steps of the landing. The awning was canted, the commodore and his friend got out and mounted the stairway, while the boat's crew stood up with their hats off. On the mole were four or five people in light West India rig of brown and white, and broad Guayaquil sombreros.

"Cleveland!" exclaimed a tall, handsome man, as he seized the commodore by both hands, "how glad we are to see you! Here is Tom Stewart, and Paddy Burns, and little Don Stingo, attorneys, factors, and sugar-boilers, all of us delighted to welcome you back once more to Jamaica!"

Crowding about the commodore, shaking hands and slapping one another on the back, standing off a step or two to see the effect of time on each other's appearance, laughing heartily with many a happy allusion to days gone by, those old friends and former companions, unmindful of the hot sun, stood there with their faces lighted up and talking all together.

"And you are a commodore, eh! Cleveland, with a broad pennant and a squadron? Ah! we have kept the run of you, though. Read all about that action you were in with the 'President,' and that bloody battle in the 'Essex' and 'Phebe' at Valparaiso, with Porter. And here you are again, safe and sound, and hearty!"

"And you too, Piron! The same as ever! Not tired of cane-planting yet? But how is madame?"

"Lovely a girl as ever, Cleveland, but never entirely got over that sad loss of the little boy, you know. However, she will be overjoyed to see you. She's been talking of you ever since we saw your appointment to the station fifteen months ago. Apropos, we have her widowed sister with us, whose husband was killed at Waterloo, and our little niece who came from France—all out there at the old place of Escondido, where you must come and pass a week with us. Nay, man, no excuse! The thing is arranged, and it would be the death of Stingo, Tom Stewart, and Paddy Burns if you disappoint us."

"Well, Piron, I am your man, but not for a day or two, until I have made some official calls here on the authorities. Meanwhile, gentlemen, you all dine with me this evening on board the frigate, every mother's soul of you! Coxswain, go on board and tell my steward to have dinner for six. Stop at the schooner as you go off, and say to Mr. Darcantel that I shall expect him to join us. Now, my friends, that matter is arranged, and we will all go off in the barge at sunset."

"Dry talking, isn't it, Stingo?" said Piron; "so, commodore, come, and we'll have a sip of sangaree and a deviled biscuit to keep our mouths in order. But, halloo! where is your friend, Cleveland? that tall man in black? Parson or chaplain, eh?"

"No," replied the officer; "an old friend of mine, my brother-in-law, who takes a cruise with me occasionally; but he never goes in society, and has taken himself off, as he always does when we get in port. He is a glorious fellow, though, and I hope to present him to you yet. Never mind him now."

Arm in arm went the blue coat and bullion, locked in white grass sleeves, along the busy quays, crowded with mule-carts and drays for stores or shipping. Spanish dons, dapper Frenchmen, burly John Bulls, standing at warehouse and posadas, all with cigars in their teeth, which they puffed so lazily that the smoke scarcely found its way beyond the brims of their wide sombreros. Negroes, too, with scanty leg gear, and still scantier gingham shirts, having bales, or boxes, or baskets of fruit on their heads, never any thing in their hands, chattering and laughing one with another as they danced and jostled along the busy mart; then through the hot, sandy ruts of streets, pausing now and then to shake hands with some old acquaintance beneath the overhanging piazzas; sedan-chairs moving about, with a negro in a glazed hat and red cockade at either end of the poles, in a long easy trot, as they bore their burdens of Spanish matron, or English damsel, or maybe a portly old judge, or gouty admiral, on a shopping or business excursion to the port; so on to the upper town, where the dwellings stand in detachments by themselves—single or in pairs—with spacious balconies and bright green Venetian blinds, all surrounded by gardens and vines; with noble tamarind-trees, and cocoa-nuts swaying their lofty trunks, and rattling their branches and leaves over the negro huts and offices below. Here the party stopped, and, entering a house, were ushered into a cool, lofty room, where there were a lot of mahogany desks, and a single old clerk, who resembled a last year's dried lemon, with some few drops of acid juice for blood, perched up on a hard stem of a high stool, with four or five quill pens, like so many thorns, sticking out above his yellow leafy ears.

"All by myself here, Cleveland, as I told you. All my people are living out there at Escondido. Very little business doing just now, and Paddy Burns and Tom Stewart haven't had a suit or a fight for the last six months. Inkstands dry, and my old clerk, Clinker, there, has forgotten how to write English.

"However," went on Piron, as the party threw themselves back on the wicker arm-chairs, and enjoyed the breeze which fluttered merrily through the blinds, "the cellar isn't quite dry yet; and I say, Clinker, suppose you tell Nimble Jack, or Ring Finger Bill, to spread a little luncheon here, with a bottle or two of Bordeaux, or something of that sort!" The dried, fruity old gentleman dropped off his branch at the desk like a withered nut, and then, with a husky kind of shuffle, betook himself off.



"Queer old stick, that!" said the commodore, as he unbuckled his sword and laid it on the table.

"Ah! he grew here, and will blow away one of these days. My father used to tell me that he looked just the same when he first sprouted as he does now. But he is a dear faithful old stump; and you must remember hearing, Cleveland, of that frightful earthquake here in seventeen hundred and eighty-three, which killed so many people? Yes? Well, it was old Clinker who saved my sweet wife that is now—and her sister; though he was nearly squeezed—drier, if any thing, than he is now—in doing it. He lay, you know, Stingo, supporting the whole second story of the house for seven hours, pressed as flat as a tamarind-leaf, while they were getting those twin babies out of their cradle. Yes, God bless him!" Starting up, while a flush of feeling darkened his face—"but, what is more, he threw himself precisely where he did, as he saw the walls giving way, so that not a hair of those children should be injured when the beams came down. My father has told me since, that when they got a lever under the timber and wedged old Clinker out, he gave a kind of cackle; but, in my opinion, he has not drawn a breath from that day to this. And, generally, he is a very taciturn old root, and rarely opens his rind; but latterly he talks a good deal about the earthquake; says he's sure there'll be another awful one before an interval of forty years has passed, and wants us to go away. No objection, however, to coming back when the thing is over, and then waiting forty years for another. Don't laugh, you Paddy Burns, for if ever the 'Tremblor' gives you one little shake, you'll jump higher than you did when that ugly Frenchman ran you through your waistcoat pocket, and you thought it was your midriff. Now, Tom Stewart and Don Stingo, what are you grinning about? Your teeth will chatter so fast at the next quake that you won't, either of you, be able to deliver a charge to the jury over a false invoice, or suck another drop of old Antigua rum."

"But really, Piron," broke in the commodore upon this voluble harangue, "do you give heed to these barkings of that old clerk?"

"Why, yes, Cleveland," replied Piron, with rather a grave manner, "I do; and, moreover, my sweet wife Rosalie out yonder, who has never got over her grief for the loss of our boy, regards every word old Clinker says as so much prophecy; and the upshot of the business is, I have made up my mind to leave the island."

"For where, my friend—back to France?"

"No. Since the war and the peace, with Bonaparte at St. Helena, France is no place for an Englishman, even with a French father, and I am going to try America."

"Truly, Piron, I am charmed to hear it. But what part of America?"

"Why, I've bought a fine sugar estate at a bargain in Louisiana, and there we shall pass the remainder of our days."

"He! he!" sniggled Tom Stewart, while Don Stingo and Paddy Burns cackled incredulously; but, at the same moment, Ring Finger Bill and Nimble Jack, two jet-black persons, in loose striped gingham shirts and bare feet, with an attempt at a grave expression of thick-lipped coffee-coolers, the whites of their eyes turned up with becoming decorum, and preceded by the old twig of a clerk, who seemed to crackle in the sea-breeze as he again hung himself, stern on, to his stool of a trunk, entered the cool counting-house, bearing trays, fruits, and bottles, which they methodically arranged on the large table.

"Massa! him want small, red, plump snapper, make mizzible brile?" said Nimble Jack. "S'pose Massa Ossifa him pick shell of land-crab, wid crisp pepper for salad?"

"No, no! Put those cool water-monkeys on the table and be gone! Come, Clinker, take a bite with us!"

Leaving this pleasant party to sip their claret and water, and nibble their midday food, while they rambled back to the past or schemed into the future, we will return to the frigate.



CHAPTER XXXI.

THE COMMANDER OF THE "ROSALIE."

"The handsomest fellow, Heaven bless him! Setting the girls all wild to possess him, With his dark mustache and his hazel eyes, And cigars in those pretty lips—"

"That girl who fain would choose a mate, Should ne'er in fondness fail her, May thank her lucky stars if Fate Should splice her to a sailor."

"The 'Rosalie's' gig coming alongside, sir," reported the quarter-master to the officer of the watch.

"Very well. A boatswain's mate and two side-boys. Mr. Rat, have the barge manned, and send her on shore for the commodore. Mr. Martin, tell the boatswain to call all hands to furl awnings."

While these orders were being executed, the whistles ringing through the ship, the sailors lining the white hammocks, stowed in a double line, fore and aft, around the nettings of the frigate, in readiness to cast off the stops and lacings and let fall the awnings, the officer on deck stood near the gangway. At the same time there tripped up the accommodation-ladder, lightly touching the snowy man-ropes, a young fellow of about one-and-twenty, dressed in undress frock-coat, one epaulet, smooth white trowsers, and shoes. Catching up his sword in his left hand as he reached the upper grating of the ladder, he took off his blue, gold-banded cap, and half bounded, with a springy step, on to the frigate's deck.

Observe him well, young ladies, as he stands there; for of all the scarlet or blue jackets on whose arm you have leaned and looked up at with your soft violet, blue, or dark eyes, you never saw a young fellow that you would sooner give those eyes, or those warm hearts too, throbbing under your bodices, or who would drive you wilder to possess him, than that gallant young sailor standing on the "Monongahela's" deck. Ay, observe him well, that tall, graceful youth, with a waist you might span with one of your short plump arms; those slim patrician feet, that might wear your own little satin slippers; then that swelling chest and those elegantly turned shoulders, which will take both of your arms, one of these days, to entwine and clasp around them! Ah! but the round throat and chin, the smiling mouth, half hiding a double row of even teeth, with the merest moonshine of a mustache darkening the short upper lip, and then those large, fearless hazel eyes, sparkling with health and fun, shaded by a mass of chestnut curls, which cluster about his clear open forehead! Ay, there he stands, "a king and a kingdom" for the girl who wins him!

"Well, Harry, give us your fist, my boy! How do you get on aboard your prize? Not so roomy as the old frigate, eh? And a little more work than when you were playing flag-lieutenant, eh? Well, glad to see you, but can't stop to talk. So jump down below there in the wardroom; the mess are just through dinner, and yours won't be ready for an hour yet. Come, bear a hand, or I'll let these awnings fall on your new gold epaulet."

The new-comer tripped as lightly down the ladder to the gun-deck as Mr. Mouse, and making another dive down to the berth-deck, exchanging a rapid volley of pleasantry with the midshipmen in the steerage, he opened the wardroom door and entered. There, in a large open space, transversely dividing the stern of the ship, with rows of latticed-doored staterooms on either side, lighted by open skylights from above, with a barrel of a wind-sail coming down between the sashes, and every thing, from beams to bulkheads, painted a glistening white, and the deck so clean that you might have rubbed your handkerchief on it without leaving a stain on the cambric, around a large extension mahogany table stretching from side to side, the cloth removed, decanters and wine-glasses here and there, and water-monkeys in flannel jackets hanging like criminals from a gallows from the beams above, sat the wardroom mess of the frigate.

"By all that's handsome, here's Darcantel! Why, Harry, we are delighted to see you!" exclaimed half a dozen voices; "come, sit down here and take a glass of wine with us!"

As the handsome young fellow entered the wardroom, all faces lighted up as they saw him. The old sailing-master, who seldom indulged in more than a scowl since he lost his right ear by the stroke of a cutlass in capturing the tender to the "Plantagenet" seventy-four off the Hills of Navesink; the rigid old major of marines, who pipe-clayed his very knuckles, and wore a stiff sheet-iron padding to his stock to encourage discipline in the guard; the dear, kind old surgeon, who swallowed calomel pills by the pint, out of pure principle, and who lopped off limbs and felt yellow fever pulses all through the still watches of the hot nights with never a sign or look of encouragement; and the staid old chaplain, who had often assisted the surgeon and helped to fill cartridges, contributing his own cotton hose for the purpose when those government stores gave out in battle, and who never smiled, even when committing a marine to the briny deep; the purser, too, prim and business-like, looking as if he were a complicated key with an iron lock of his own strong chest, calculating perpetually the amount of dollars deposited in his charge, the total of pay to be deducted therefrom, and never making a mistake save when he overcharged the dead men for chewing tobacco; and the gay, young, roistering lieutenants, who never did any thing else but laugh, unmindful of navigation, pipe-clay, pills, parsons, or pursers, though standing somewhat in awe of the sharpish, exacting executive officer at the head of the table—all welcomed, each in his peculiar way, the bright, graceful young blade who dawned upon them. And not only the mess were cheered by his presence, but also a troop of clean-dressed sable attendants, whose wide jaws stretched wider, while the whites of their eyes seemed painfully like splashes of whitewash on the outside of the galley coppers, as they nudged one another and yaw-yaw'd quietly away aft there in the region of the pantry.

"Here, my salt-water pet, come and sit down by me, where all those old fellows can see you! Steward, a wine-glass for Mr. Darcantel! What? you won't take a sip of Tinta, and you can only stop a minute because you are to dine with your uncle the commodore, eh? Well, I'll drink your uncle's health even if you don't!" said the first lieutenant, as he familiarly laid his hand on the young fellow's shoulder and drained his glass.

"Why, Harry, what the deuce did you come down here for?" squeaked out the purser, as he unscrewed his lips into a pleasant smile. "You've put an end to that interesting account the master was giving us of how he lay inside Sandy Hook for six months with a glass to his—"

"Mouth," broke in the surgeon.

"It was Sam Jones the fisherman, Who was bound to Sandy Hook; But first upon the Almanac A solemn oath he took— That he would catch a load of clams!"

"Silence there, you roarer!" said the surgeon, as he popped a filbert into the wide mouth of the rollicking fourth lieutenant, which cut his song short off. "Yes, Harry, that's what you have done in coming here for a minute. But stay a week with us, and the master will tell it you again. We've heard it once or twice before."

The old grizzled sea veteran scratched the remains of his ear, and growled jocosely while nodding to young Darcantel.

"Ah! my dear boy, and I'll tell you how the surgeon and nipcheese there were entertained by a one-eyed old Spaniard at St. Jago."

"Let's hear it!" roared every body except the medico and purser. "Out with it, master!"

"Well, messmates, when we were in the old 'Scourge,' a long time ago, one day we anchored in St. Jago de Cuba."

Here the surgeon and purser smiled horribly, and implored the grizzled old navigator not to go on; every body had heard that old story; he might fall ill with the vomito pietro, and would require pills; or else there might be found a mistake in his pay account, and he would like, perhaps, to draw for the imaginary balance not due to him, and to drink his grog and scratch the remains of his old ear, or turn his attention to the load of clams waiting for him at Sandy Hook! But, for mercy's sake, don't repeat that silly, long-forgotten yarn!

"Well, messmates, in less than an hour after we had anchored in St. Jago they went on shore, and made the acquaintance of a little thin, sharp old villain, with one eye, who invited them to make him a visit, and pass the evening on a fine estate he owned near the base of the Copper Hills, some distance—about four leagues, I believe—from the town. He was a most respectable person, very rich, and commanded a Cuban guarda costa to boot. The capitano, Don Ignacio Sanchez—wasn't that his name, doctor? Oh! you forget—all right! Off they started with a guide, on hired mules; but when they pulled up at their destination they found the Don wasn't there, though they were handsomely entertained by the senora—a comely, fat, and waspish body, with very few clothes on—who cursed her Don for sending people to see her, and the visitors too for coming. However, as her guests had not dined, she fed them bountifully on a supper of the nastiest jerked beef and garlic they had ever smelled. You told me so, purser."

Both Pills and Purser had forgotten all about it, and thought it would be better to talk of something else; that there was plenty of good wine to drink in place of drying his lips on such dusty old rubbish.

"Well, messmates, after the supper the old lady demanded a little game of monte, and she insisted, too, on making herself banker, though she had no money on the table to pay with in case she lost—which she had no intention of doing. So she won every ounce, dollar, real, and centavo they had in their pockets! The doctor and purser told me they saw her cheat boldly; but yet she not only bagged all the money, but she won their mules into the bargain!"

Here those individuals confessed roundly—standing on the defensive—that the fat old senora had a false pack of cards always ready in her ample bosom, and had cheated them in the barest manner conceivable; but yet they had no appeal, and were inclined, out of gallantry for the sex, to behave like gentlemen, though she did drink aguardiente.

"Well, messmates, toward midnight that hospitable wife of the Don began to abuse our friends for not bringing more cash with them when they visited ladies, and then fairly kicked them out of the house! Yes, you both told me so when I lent you the money to pay the boatmen, after being obliged to tramp all the way back to the port on foot, nearly missing their billets in the old 'Scourge.'"

"Go on, master! Tell us all about it; don't stop!"

"Well, messmates, I was on deck while beating out of the channel, and just abreast the Star Castle I saw a boat with two gentlemen in the stern, stripped to a girt-line, and howling at rather than hailing the ship. Bear in mind, doctor, the men refused to take either of you unless you gave them your coats and trowsers before shoving off. And don't you remember, Hardy, how they yelled at us, and we thought they were deserters from that English gun-boat in St. Jago? And how the captain arrested the pair of them when they got on board for going out of signal distance? This is the first time I ever told this yarn," concluded the old navigator, tugging away at the lobe of his lost ear.

The young lieutenants shouted, and the old major of marines, forgetful of his iron-stuffed stock, laughed till he nearly sawed his chin off, rubbing his chalky knuckles into his eyes the while.

"But first upon the Almanac A solemn oath he took— That he would catch a load of clams—"

"The barge is coming off, Mr. Hardy, with the pennant flying, sir!" reported a reefer, in the midst of the conversation, to the first lieutenant, as he shoved his bright face through the wardroom door.

"Very good, Mr. Beaver; but hark ye, sir! the next time you go ashore in the market-boat, look sharp that the men don't suck the monkey. Three of them came off drunk this morning. And inform Mr. Rat and Mr. Mouse that if I see their heels on the cutter's cushions again, I'll take a better look at them from the main-top-mast cross-trees. You understand, sir? Steward, a glass of wine for Mr. Beaver!" Saying this, the executive officer, with Harry Darcantel, arose and went on deck to receive the commodore.



CHAPTER XXXII.

A SPLICE PARTED.

"Oh! for thy voice, that happy voice, To breathe its loving welcome now! Fame, wealth, and all that bids rejoice, To me are vain! For where art thou?"

"What is glory—what is fame? That a shadow—this a name, Restless mortal to deceive. Are they renown'd—can they be great, Who hurl their fellow-creature's fate, That mothers, children, wives may grieve?"

The drum rolled, the marines presented arms, the boatswain piped, the side-boys and officers took off their caps; and as the colors dropped with the last ray of sunset from the peak, and the broad blue day-pennant came fluttering down from the lofty main truck, Commodore Cleveland and his friends stood on the splendid deck of the flag-ship "Monongahela."

It must have been with conscious pride that the brave and loyal commander gazed around him on the noble frigate and her gallant crew. The white decks, the tiers of cannon polished like varnished leather, with the breechings and tackles laid fair and even over and around them; the bright belaying-pins, holding their never-ending coils of running gear—the burnished brass capstan—the great boom—board to the boats amidships with a gleaming star of cutlasses, reflecting a glitter on the ring of long pikes stuck around the main-mast near, all inclosed by the high and solid bulwarks; while towering above, like mighty leafless columns of forest pines, stood the lofty masts, running up almost out of sight to the trucks in the fading light, supported by stays and shrouds, singly and in pairs, and braided mazes—black, and straight, and taut—never a thread loose on rigging or ratlin—and spreading out as they came down in a heavy hempen net, till they disappeared over the rail, and were clenched and spliced, or seized and clamped to the bolts and dead-eyes of the chain-plates outside. Holding up too, in mid-heaven, on those giant trunks—like a child its toys—the great square yards of timber branches, laying without a quiver, in their black lifts and trusses, with their white leaves of sails crumpled and packed in smooth bunts in the middle, and running away to nothing on either hand at the tapering yard-arms.

Grand and imposing is the sight. And well may you wonder, ye land lubbers, why all that mass of timber, sails, and cordage, with its enormous weight, does not crush with the giant heels of the masts through the bottom of the ship like unto an egg-shell, and tear the stanch live-oak frame to splinters!

The commander of the frigate saw all this, and he beheld at the same time the clusters of happy sailors, sauntering with light step and pleasant faces up and down the waist and gangways; and he heard, too, the scraping of a fiddle on the forecastle, the shuffling, dancing feet, and the least notion of a jovial sea-song coming up from the gun-deck. Yes, it must have been a glorious pride with which that gallant officer gazed around him from the quarter-deck of the magnificent frigate.

Did he say to himself, "I am monarch of this floating kingdom; my will is law; I say but the word, and those sails are spread and the ship moves to wherever I command. My subjects, too, who watch my slightest look and whisper, with that flag above, will pour broadside upon broadside—ay, they have!—from those terrible guns upon whoever dares to cross my track. Yes. They will fight for me so long as there is a plank left in this huge ship to stand upon, and while there is a rope-yarn left to hold the ensign—ay! even until my pennant, nailed to the truck, sinks beneath the bloodstained waves?" Did the commander think of all this? Perhaps he did.

And yet, in all the pride of rank and power, bravely won and maintained in many a scene of strife and deadly conflict, with visions of honest patriotism and ambition for the future, did his thoughts go back long years ago into the shadowy past, and was his spirit in the silent church-yard, where the magnolia was drooping over a grass-green grave? The sweet mother and her baby boy—the girl who had so fondly loved him, and the child who played about his knees—oh that they could have lived to share the wreaths of victory which were hung around his brow; that they could have lived to see the sword his country gave him, to twine but for one little moment their loving arms around his neck! No, the magnolia waves its white flowers over mother and boy, and they sleep on in their heavenly and eternal rest.

Did Commodore Cleveland, as a saddened flash of thought swept over his handsome face, while he stood on his quarter-deck, dwell on those scenes? Yes, we know he did. By day and night, in war and peace, in gale or calm, on deck or at banquet, in dream and action, the girl and mother he so dearly loved was close clasped to his heart, and the child still playing at his knee.

"Gentlemen, let me make you acquainted with the first lieutenant, Mr. Hardy; and permit me also to present my nephew, Mr. Darcantel, captain, if you please, my friends, of the one-gun schooner 'Rosalie,' formerly the slaver 'Perdita,' cut out of a river on the Gold Coast by the young gentleman who stands before you."

"Rosalie! why that's the name of my niece," exclaimed Piron; "and she is prettier and whiter than your trim little craft, sir. But you must come with the commodore to Escondido, and judge for yourself. But, bless my soul! you resemble our Rosalie, even if your schooner don't. Why, look at him, Paddy Burns!"

Don Stingo, and Tom Stewart, and the Paddy did look at him, and all shook hands with him, laughing the while at Piron, and asking when old Clinker looked for another earthquake.

"Come, Piron, come, gentlemen, don't let us keep the soup waiting! By the way, Mr. Hardy, will you do me the favor to take a glass of wine with us after gun-fire?"

"Thank you."

"Suppose you bring little Mouse with you; I like children; and perhaps you will excuse the younker from keeping his watch to-night? A little extra sleep in hammock won't hurt him, you know."

And so Commodore Cleveland raised his hat, followed by the eyes of respect and devotion from officer and sailor, as he passed down the ladder and entered his spacious cabin.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE BLUE PENNANT IN THE CABIN.

"To Bachelors' hall we good fellows invite To partake of the chase that makes up our delight."

"Ask smiling honor to proclaim What is glory, what is fame? Hark! the glad mandate strikes the list'ning ear! 'The truest glory to the bosom dear, Is when the soul starts soft compassion's tear.'"

"Now, gentlemen, let me get off this heavy coat and epaulets. There! all right, Domino! put the sword in its case, and give me a white jacket. Choose your own places, my friends. Piron, sit here on my right; Henri, take the foot of the table."

These last words were said in French; whereupon Piron started and whispered to the commodore, "By George, Cleveland, is that youth's name Henry, and does he speak French?"

"Hush, Piron, he may hear you. His mother was French, and he speaks the language like a native. She died when he was a baby, and he doesn't like to allude to it. Come, steward, we are all ready. Serve the gumbo!"

The cabin of the frigate was divided by a light lattice-work bulkhead in two parts, running from quarter to quarter of the vessel. The after part had a large sleeping stateroom on either side, resting on the quarter galleries, and opening on to another gallery which hung over the stern of the frigate. Inside, in the open space, was a round table, cushioned lounges, a few chairs, with a bronze lamp pendent from a beam above, while taking the curve of the stern over the after windows was a range of bookcases, half hidden by the gilt cornice and curtains of the windows. The entire fittings and furniture of cabin and staterooms, including the neat Brussels carpet on the deck, were elegant and useful, though by no means luxurious. The forward cabin, where no carpet graced the floor, was much more spacious. It took in the two after ports of the gun-deck; and the carriages and cannon within the sills of the ports were painted a marble white, as were the ropes, in covered canvas, that held them. In a recess forward was a large mahogany sideboard, or buffet, the top fitted with a framework for glasses and decanters, which were reflected from a large mirror let into the bulkhead. In the middle of this space was the dining-table, lighted by a pair of globe lamps hanging from above, while neat racks for bottles and water-jugs, moving on sliding brass rods, were also suspended from the paneled beams and carlines of the upper deck ceiling. On the right—the starboard side—was a door leading into a roomy pantry, where the steward and Domino, and the servants of the commodore, bestirred themselves at dinner-time.

"So, my friends," exclaimed the commodore, "you wish to hear what became of me after I last parted with you?"

"By all means, Cleveland! we are all dying to hear, and—" Here Piron's appeal was interrupted by the heavy report of a bow gun, which gave a slight, though almost imperceptible jar to the frigate.

"Smithereens! Stingo! what noise is that?" exclaimed Burns.

"Only the nine o'clock gun, sir," replied Darcantel.

"Hech, mon!" said Stewart, "ye needna upset ma glass of auld Madeira in yer mickle fright, for I've seen the time when ye ha' laughed at the music in the report of a peestol and the ping of a bullet! But your nervous seestem seems to be unstrung ever since the sma' French dancing count untied the string o' your waistcoat with his rapeer."

"You don't think, Paddy, the commodore here is going to bang a forty-two pound shot into our stomachs after all the good prog he's filled them with?" added Stingo, sotto voce, while the rotund Milesian threw his head back and twinkled careless defiance at them all.

Just then the orderly swung the port-cabin door open, and standing up as rigid as a pump-bolt, with a finger to the visor of his stovepipe hat, in cross-belts and bayonet, he announced "Lieutenant Hardy and Midshipman Mouse!"

"Ah! Hardy, glad to see you!" rising as he spoke; "squeeze in there between Stewart and Burns, or Darcantel! Here, gentlemen, let me exhibit to you Mr. Tiny Mouse! Don't move, Piron; I'll make a place for him near me."

Saying this, the commodore took the lad affectionately by the hand, and as he sat him down on a chair at his elbow, and while the conversation went on with his guests, he said, in a kindly tone,

"Tiny, my dear, the first lieutenant tells me you are a good boy and attend to your duty. I hope you pay attention to your studies also, and write often to your dear mother. Ah! you do? That is right; for you know you are her only hope since your brave father was killed. There, sir, you may swig a little claret, but don't touch those cigars."

"Come, Cleveland! Cleveland! you are forgetting your adventures, my boy!"

"Well, my friends, you shall hear them."



CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE DEVIL TO PAY.

"And how then was the devil dressed? Oh! he was dressed in his Sunday's best; His jacket was red and his breeches were blue, And there was a hole where the tail came through."

"Hairy-faced Dick understands his trade, He stands by the breech of a short carronade, The linstock glows in his bony hand, Waiting that grim old skipper's command!"

"The last dinner I had in Jamaica, and a very jolly one it was, as you all know, was out at Escondido, where we kept it up so late that I only got on board the 'Scourge' at daylight, in time to get her under way with the land wind. Well, we were bound to windward, and for a week afterward we rolled about in a calm off Morant Bay, maybe twenty leagues off the island, and one morning we discovered a sail. She was a large merchant brig, heading any way, and bobbing about, as we were, in the calm. Toward noon, however, a light air sprang up, and we got within hail, and I went on board to say a word or two to the skipper, for we had news before leaving Kingston that that infamous pirate Brand, in his long-legged schooner 'Centipede,' had been seen off Guadaloupe; and, in fact, we had actually chased him off Matanzas three months before; so I was ordered to give the brig a warning, particularly as she had reported a suspicious craft in sight that same morning at sunrise. When I got on board of her I saw—"

Here Piron placed both hands to his face as he leaned his elbows on the table, and the commodore, checking himself, hurried on:

"Ah! well, we kept the brig in sight all day, and ran round her once or twice in the evening, but toward midnight the trade wind freshened, and, as the coast seemed clear, and we were anxious to make up for lost time in the calm, we gradually came up to our course, and went bowling away to windward.

"I remember going below at the time, and just as I was about to turn in, I heard a quarter-master sing out to Hardy there, who was junior lieutenant of the ship, and who had the middle watch, that he saw a light going up to the brig's gaff. In five seconds I was on the poop, where I met the captain.

"This is his only son, gentlemen, and a braver or more skillful seaman never trod a ship's deck," said the commodore, as he passed his hand affectionately over the boy's head, who was sitting beside him.

But he forgot, perhaps, to say that he, Cleveland, had stood by the father when he was struck dead by a cannon-shot, and that afterward he had the boy appointed a reefer, and, out of his own means, helped the widow to eke out her pittance of a pension. Yes, Cleveland forgot all that as he smoothed the youngster's soft hair, while, with the men around him, he drained his glass in silence to the memory of his departed friend and chief. Then resuming, he went on:

"In less than no time after the light was seen—for you must know, gentlemen, that it was an understood signal between us—the 'Scourge' was flying off with a stiff breeze abaft the beam, the crew at quarters, and the boats ready to be lowered from the davits. When we ranged up alongside the brig, and even before, we felt certain that our misgivings would prove true, and so they did; and merely slamming a shot over her, and dropping a couple of armed boats into the water, we luffed round her bows, and there we saw that cursed schooner—venomous snake as she was—just hoisting her sails, and creeping away to windward.

"We let her have two or three divisions of grape, and followed the dose up with round shot. I am sure we hit her, and that pretty hard, for we knocked away her fore-top-mast, and we saw the splinters fly in showers from her hull. However, she was well handled, and lying nearer the wind than the 'Scourge,' when day dawned she was clear out of range, and leaving us every minute. So we up helm and ran down again to the brig, to see what mischief had been done and to pick up our boats.

"Ah! yes, you all know what had taken place, so I won't go over the details; but the same afternoon, after seeing the brig pointed straight for Port Royal, and while we were once more on our course, we fell in with a water-logged boat, in which were half a dozen dead and dying men. One, a mongrel Indian from Yucatan, who was frightfully torn by two or three grape-shot, before he died on board—as did all the others—gave us, in his confused dialect, some account of the pirate he had served under, and the haunt he frequented. As near as we could learn, the haunt was situated somewhere on the south side of Cuba, on a rocky island having a safe and secure inlet; but as he did not know the latitude or longitude, we were left somewhat in the dark. The last words, however, the mangled wretch uttered, as the gasping breath was leaving his body, were, that the spot could be distinguished by a tall cocoa-nut-tree which grew from a craggy eminence in the middle of the island. We buried them all, pirates as they were, decently, and then we clapped on all sail on our course.

"Steward, another bottle of the old Southside that Mr. March sent me from Madeira! Here, Domino, take Mr. Mouse up gently, and lay him down on my cot in the after cabin. Dear little fellow, he is sound asleep; and mind you draw the curtains around him, lest he take cold from the draught of the stern windows!"

Rather a striking contrast this to the way Captain Brand, the pirate, treated the little Henri in the den there in the Doce Leguas.

"Well, gentlemen, for some weeks after these occurrences we sailed about the islands, touching here and there, until at last we arrived at the Havana, took in stores and water, and then continued the cruise. The orders were to beat up the south side of Cuba, where we expected to fall in with the Musquito fleet and some English vessels, especially detailed to destroy two or three nests of pirates who had for some years swarmed in those seas and infested that coast. In the course of time we beat all around the south side of Cuba, and at last dropped anchor in St. Jago, where we learned from the English consular agent that five or six fellows, who had been wrecked on the Carvalo reef, were identified as having been part of a piratical crew who had plundered an English vessel with a free passport bound to Havana, and had been sent there in irons for trial.

"The truth was, that the Spanish colonial authorities had so long connived, winked at, or been indifferent to what was going on during the wars of the Continent, that they allowed these piratical hordes to exist and thrive at their very doors. The matter had already been brought to the notice of the administrador of the port, and all other ports as far along the coast as Cienfuegos, and in such a threatening manner, too, that the governor at St. Jago, fearful of having his town blown down, exerted himself in the arrest of the rascals I have alluded to, and likewise in procuring information by dispatching guarda costas along the south side of the island.

"Accordingly, the very morning we anchored I went ashore with the captain of the custom-house, where we met the deputy administrador and a little withered, one-eyed old rascal, who was in the colonial service, and who professed to know the haunt, or at least he said he thought he did, of that notorious villain Brand.

"I remember distinctly spreading a chart before him, and while he traced with the end of his cigarette a course for the captain to steer by, I stood near, watching him narrowly. But the fact was, that he had the very sharpest spark of an eye set, or rather standing out, beside his nose that any body ever saw in a human being's head; and instead of me watching him, he seemed to be looking straight through me, and divining my thoughts and suspicions. However, the spot he pointed out, and the way he described it, with a cocoa-nut-tree on top of a rock, and the passage through the reef, so nearly corresponded with the confused account the Yucatanese gave us before he died, that the captain was entirely convinced we were on the scent, though I myself was not more than half satisfied. The place indicated was near the Isle of Pines, three hundred miles off; but, to make the thing more plausible, that one-eyed old scoundrel was detailed to run along the Doce Leguas Cays, see what information he could pick up there, and then follow down after us.

"That night, or early the next morning, we were off again, and ran down the coast, with a good offing to keep the wind, until we got to the ground, and passed in by Cape St. Francis, and doubled round into the Bight of Pines. There we fell in with a whole fleet of English and American cruisers and schooner craft, who informed us that they had searched every accessible spot where a man could walk dry-shod upon, from Guayabos to the Isle of Mangles; that they had destroyed several old and deserted piratical nests, and hung two or three ostensible fishermen by way of wholesome warning to their allies the pirates; but that was all; and from what they had learned, there did not seem to have been an established retreat in that maze of cays and reefs for four or five years.

"So you see we had our cruise for nothing, and then the captain agreed with me that we had both been most egregiously deceived by the Spanish commander of the guarda costa. Well, we hauled our wind once more, standing well out to sea, and after a tedious beat of some days we again edged in toward the coast, somewhere near the Boca Grande of the Twelve League Cays on the westernmost side. It was in the morning when we made the land, and, steering close in, we got a good slant off the shore, and kept the glasses going from the topmost cross-trees down all through the day. For my part, as Hardy may perhaps remember, I scarcely took the glass from my eye for eight hours, and from the mizzen-top I feel quite sure that there were not many objects, from the size of a blade of grass to a mangrove bush, that I did not examine, from the coral reefs up to the rocky heights, let alone the cocoa-nut-tree that we were in search of.

"Toward afternoon, however, the weather came up hazy, the wind began to fall off, and the barometer began to exhibit very queer spasms indeed, rising with a sort of jerk at first, and then dropping down the tenth of an inch at a clip, with the atmosphere becoming close and sultry, and the men gasping about the decks as if we were about to choke at the next breath. It was during the hurricane months, and the indications certainly should have led us as far as our legs could carry us to open water, instead of being caught embayed perhaps with half a thousand reefs around us on what might prove a lee-shore; but, nevertheless, the captain decided to hold on till sunset, and then make an offing. The breeze still held in the upper sails, and so we slipped on in smooth water till about five o'clock, when I heard a fellow sing out from the main royal yard,

"'On deck there! I can see a tall cocoa-nut-tree on an island here on the port bow!'

"Before the words were well out of his mouth I too caught the object, and I knew at the first glance that it was the spot we were looking for. At the same time the haze lighted up a bit, and we saw the ridge of rocks and every thing as the haunt of that pirate Brand had been described to us. So, my friends, we were all alive once more on board the 'Scourge,' and the captain resolved to dash in upon the scoundrel's nest before he could have time to leave it.

"The engine was rigged and water spirted over the sails from the trucks down, to make the canvas hold the wind, and in an hour after we were within two leagues of the island, and just as the sun fell below the horizon we caught sight of the mast-heads of a large vessel sticking up over some bluff rocks near the bold shore. Not five minutes later the hull of the craft came slowly out from the gap, under all sail, and we discovered her to be a long and rather lumbering-looking brigantine, painted lead-color, and bearing no resemblance to the schooner we had twice chased before. Simultaneously, however, with her coming out into full view, as she rounded in her head-yards and got a pull of the main-sheet, with the breeze abeam and heading to the eastward, we beheld a great volume of white smoke spout up over the rock near the cocoa-nut-tree, with a vivid sheet of flame at the base, and before the vast column turned, like the crown of a palm-tree, in its descent, we were greeted by a dull, heavy roar, the concussion of which fairly made the 'Scourge' tremble. Then, as the white smoke partially broke away, an avalanche of rocks and timbers was scattered far and near, and nothing visible but a veil of dust and masses of heavy smoke. Nearly at the same moment of this explosion wreaths of heavy black smoke arose from another spot nearer to the gap, lit up in the fading, hazy twilight with forked red fires, and soon after a great conflagration burst forth, swirling flakes of burning cinders all over the island, and casting a lurid glare upon the water around us."



CHAPTER XXXV.

AND THE PITCH HOT.

"He is born for all weathers; Let the winds blow high or blow low, His duty keeps him to his tethers, And where the gale drives he must go.

"The wind blew hard, the sea ran high, The dingy scud drove 'cross the sky, All was safe lashed, the bowl was slung, When careless thus Ned Halyard sung."

Said the commodore, with a knowing shake of his head, "Ah! gentlemen, if the fellow, whoever he was, who was creeping away so nimbly in that lazy-looking brigantine, with English colors at the peak, had written down in detail what he had been doing on that secluded nook of an island, and sent the information off to us in a letter, we could have read it without breaking the seal. We could have told him that that little scoundrel with one eye had purposely misled us, and had given him warning to quit his strong-hold; and that he had hastily got his plunder and people on board his vessel, blown up and set fire to his nest, and that the brigantine he was now on board of was once upon a time the notorious schooner 'Centipede!' Yes, we knew all that by instinct."

Piron sat with his eyes fixed upon the speaker, taking in every word as it fell from his lips, the teeth set close together and the hand clenched which supported his head on the table. Paddy Burns and Tom Stewart, too, looked eagerly that way, as did Harry Darcantel, while Hardy sipped his wine and puffed his cigar leisurely, as if he knew the tale by heart.

"It had fallen nearly calm. A light air perhaps in the royals, though nothing down below. But as we hauled down our colors at sunset, which had been hoisted to let the fellow know who we were, down came his also. Then there we both lay looking at each other. He knew by instinctive experience that we were the American corvette 'Scourge,' mounting eighteen twenty-four-pounder carronades and two long eighteens in the bow ports; for the brigantine had once or twice determined their exact calibres, and that we were the fastest cruiser, with the wind a point or two free, that had been seen in the West Indies for twenty years.



"Yes, he knew all about us, but he was still a little in doubt whether we knew all about him. He lay—unfortunately, perhaps, for him—a little beyond the range of our long guns, or else he might have been spared a good deal of time and uneasiness, and we a long chase and considerable risk. Ah! as the night came, the very fires he had kindled in his den on shore prevented his escape; for while the calm lasted the bright flames shone upon him with the glare of hell! There we lay all that night without moving a muscle or a mile until day dawned—and such a day as did dawn!

"Meanwhile the barometer had fallen an inch and a half, until the master began to believe the bulb leaked, and the mercury was dropping into the case. Then, through the murky gloom of daylight, with the sea one flat greasy surface, with never the splash of a fish to disturb it, while the lowest whisper of the topmen aloft could be distinctly heard on deck, as if we were hung in the vacuum of an exhausted receiver where a feather would drop like a bullet, suddenly there came a sound from the direction of the cays. Suppose, Burns, you saw a forty-two pound shot coming toward you, and without you dodged quick, your head would be flying off with it in the same direction?"

"Whist, mon!" said Stewart, with a groan, "dinna be calling up sic peectures of the brain, Cleveland. Paddy, there, ne'er thinks of ony meesals bigger than a peestol bullet."

"Well, my friends, we ran precisely a similar risk, though the cloudy embrasures over the island had not quite enough thunder to reach us. However, the brigantine knew what would follow as well as we did—better, perhaps—and before you could swallow that glass of wine she was stripped as bare as a bone, and down came her yards too, but keeping the sticks up, and spreading a patch of a storm staysail forward that you might apparently have put in your pocket. Her decks and rigging were crowded with men while she was doing all this, but the moment it was done, and well done too, they ran into their holes below like so many rats, and we could only see a man or two left on deck near the helm.

"All hands had been called on board the 'Scourge' at four o'clock, and, with the exception of securing the battery, every thing was ready to make a skeleton of the ship the moment we saw the brigantine begin; for she was a wary fish, and we had no idea of letting her give us the slip the third time. I had the trumpet, however, and with the captain at my elbow, the instant he saw that the brigantine was once more rigged nearly in her old way, he gave me the word, 'Now, Cleveland, work sharp!'

"With a hundred and twenty men aloft, jumping about like cats, the light sails, studding-sail booms, royal and top-gallant yards came down, the top-gallant masts after them, and the flying jib-boom rigged in. Then the top-sails close reefed and furled with extra gaskets, and so with the courses; preventer braces clapped on, rolling tackles hooked, and the spare purchases set up by the lower pennants. Meanwhile the divisions on deck had got hawsers over the launch amidships, the chains unbent, the anchors lashed down on the forecastle, and the quarter boats triced well inboard and secured with the davits. At the same time the light stuff from aloft was got below, the hammocks piped down, and the carpenters slapped the gratings on the hatches, and stood ready with the tarpaulins to batten them down. I never beheld a smarter piece of work done afloat—not even, Hardy, in the 'Monongahela.'

"As I turned round an instant a hoarse, howling bellow struck my ear from the island, and I just caught a glimpse of the tall cocoa-nut-tree flying round and round in the air like an inverted umbrella with a broken stick; while at the same time the men from aloft had reached the deck, and, jumping to the battery, the guns were run in and housed, spare breechings and extra lashings passed, and life-lines rove fore and aft. After that, gentlemen, there was no farther need of a trumpet.

"You all know pretty well what sort of a thing a hurricane is, and the one I speak of must, I think, have given you a touch of its quality here in Jamaica."

"Ay, by the holy Moses! we remember it well, bad luck to it; and so does Tom Stewart and Piron there, for it didn't lave a stick of sugar-cane standing from Montego Bay to Cape Antonio."

"Yes," said Stewart; "and to show ye what a piff of wind can do, the whirl of it caught up an eighteen-foot Honduras plank, and laid it crosswise, like an axe, full seven inches into an old tamarind trunk standing in my garden, and then twisted off the ends like a heather broom! Hech, mon, ye may see it there now any day!"

Piron was thinking of the barks that were driving before that hurricane, with no thought of the damage done to his own plantations.

"Well, then, I shall spare you all prolix description of it; and you need only fancy a ship blown every where and every how except out of water—now with the lower yard-arms cutting deep into the sea like rakes, the lee hammock-nettings under water, the stern boat torn away into splinters, the main-top-sail picked, bolt by bolt, from the yard until there was not a thread left, and the lee anchor twisted bodily out of its lashings and swept overboard!

"Then a lull, while the sea got up and the ship dashed down on the other side on her bow; then staggering back and making a stern-board till the water was plunged up in a deluge over the poop. Recovering herself again, and almost quivering on her beam-ends, the guns groaning and creaking as the terrible strain came upon the breechings, with the shot from the racks bounding about the decks, dinting holes in the solid oak waterways big enough to wash your face in, and then hopping out of the smashed half-ports to leeward. The spar-deck up to your armpits in water, and every man of us holding on to the life-lines or standing rigging like grim death, while all the time the roaring, thundering yell of the hurricane taught us how powerless we were, by hand or voice, to cope with the winds when they were let loose in all their might and fury!

"Nor need I relate to you the scene presented below—mess-chests, bags, tables, crockery, flying from deck and beam to stanchion, smashing about in the most dangerous way, pell-mell, while the worst of the tempest lasted. But, gentlemen, the 'Scourge' had a frame of live-oak, to say nothing of two or three acres of tough yellow-pine timber in her, a good deal of fibrous hemp to hold the masts up; and, moreover, she was well manned, and, though I say it myself, she had a skillful captain and thorough-bred officers, in whose sagacity the crew could rely, to manage that old 'Scourge.'"

"That she had," exclaimed Hardy; "and the most skillful and the coolest of them all was the first lieutenant!" The "Monongahela's" executive officer here bounced off his chair as if he was prepared to fight any man breathing who did not subscribe to that opinion.

"Well, my friends, that awful hurricane continued for about twenty hours, from late one morning till the beginning of the next. As for day, there was none; for the sea and black clouds made one long night of it. Fortunately, too, we had been driven off shore, and when the murky gloom broke away, and we were able to look around, our first anxiety was to see what had become of the brigantine.

"Yes, and I truly believe, in all that turmoil of the elements, while we were on the brink of foundering and going down to old Davy's locker, that there was not an officer or man, from the captain to the cook, who was not thinking of that pirate, and hoping that he might go down first. I myself, however, felt a sort of confidence, as I was held lashed on the poop to the mizzen rigging, that the brigantine might be caught and whirled about—so long as she was above water—by the same blows of the hurricane that beat upon the 'Scourge;' and when the tornado broke, and some one sang out 'Sail ho!' I knew by instinct it must be the 'Centipede.'"



CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE CHASE.

"With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove past, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled."

"Clap on more sail, pursue, give fire— She is my prize, or ocean whelms them all."

"So many slain—so many drowned! I like not of that fight to tell. Come, let the cheerful grog go round! Messmates, I've done. A spell, ho, spell!"

"It was all hands again, gentlemen. The hurricane had settled down into a moderate gale from northeast, though it was some time before the awfully confused sea got to roll regularly. Then we judged ourselves—for reckoning and observation had been out of the question—to be a long way south of Jamaica, and even to the southward of the great Pedro Bank. We did not wait this time for the pirate to lead us in getting ready for a race, but we got up a bran-new suit of top-sails and courses out of the sail-room, and, so soon as the men could go aloft with safety, they were ordered not to unbend the few tattered rags still clinging to the yards, but to cut away at once. Up went the top-sails and courses, and they were soon brought to the yards and set close-reefed, with a storm-jib to steady the ship forward. Presently we gave her the whole fore-sail and main-sail, and I think that even then, for some hours, but one half the corvette's upper works could have been visible as she plunged through the angry heaving seas.

"It left us dry enough, however, to pay some heed to the brigantine ahead of us. She was about four miles off, a little on our weather bow, and as she rode up—splendid sea-boat that she was—like a gull on the back of a mighty roller, we could see that her bulwarks—mere boards and canvas, probably—had been washed away, the house between her masts gone too, and, no doubt, her long gun, or whatever else had been lying hid under it. And now she was once more the schooner 'Centipede,' long and sharp, and without any rail to speak of, so that we could see her deck from the stem to her taffrail at every lurch she made. The only difference in her appearance was a short fore-mast with cross-trees, and a top-mast for square sails. Almost as soon as our top-sail sheets were hauled home, her own yards went up and the sail was spread, while with the bonnet off her fore-sail, the whole jib and a close-reefed main-sail, she went flying to the southward with the gale a point abaft the beam.



"Thus we went on, the sea getting more regular every hour, so that we could send up the top-gallant masts, get the yards across, shake a reef or two out, and put the 'Scourge' in order. The schooner needed no encouragement from us, but cracked on more sail until her long main-mast reeled and bent over, as she came up on the breaking ridge of a wave, like a whip-stalk. By noon the clouds had gone, and left us a clear sky, with the gale going down into a full top-gallant breeze, sending the corvette along good eleven knots. We got an observation for latitude, and five hours later we determined the longitude and our position to be a few leagues to leeward of the Sarrana Keys, with that bird of a schooner before us heading for the Musquito coast.

"If we had caught a cataract of water as it rolled over our bows in the morning, the schooner was taking her bath in the afternoon, for occasionally, for five minutes at a time, there was nothing seen of her deck, and only the masts and broad white canvas above, like jury-sticks out of a raft. But when she did slide up with her low, long hull shooting clean out of water, till nearly half her keel, with the copper sheathing flashing in the sun, was visible, she looked like a dolphin making a spring after a shoal of flying-fish. And then on her narrow deck we could see a few fellows lashed about the fore-mast, and a couple more abaft steering her like a thread through a needle.

"We began to gain upon her now, and whenever she kept a little away before the wind the gap between us closed more rapidly; for the ship could evidently outcarry the schooner, and, had the breeze freshened and the sea kept up, we could have run her under if her masts didn't go out of her, as we hoped and expected every minute they would. Gradually, however, she watched her chance and hauled up till she brought the wind barely abeam, and steered true for the Musketeers—a bad cluster of low keys nearly surrounded by as terrible ledges and reefs as any to be found in the Caribbean Sea.

"Her captain was evidently bent upon playing a desperate game, but, if he thought he would not find another ready to lay down the same stake, he was greatly mistaken! It was about sunset when we made the keys, and there we went—the schooner leading us about a mile—at a rate which would have made both vessels leap clear over the first ledge they struck, and perhaps have thrown summersaults of us into the bargain. I asked the captain, who had never left my side on the poop, if we should keep on.

"'Yes, sir,' he replied, 'so long as we have a gun and a plank to float it!'

"And, by Saint Paul! we kept on. And there was not a soul on board the 'Scourge,' from the drummer-boy up, who did not agree with the captain. How those villains on board the pirate relished this decision we could only surmise; but, at all risks, he held his course with a nerve that might have made the devil himself shudder.

"By this time the sun was well down, and a brilliant moon was riding high in the heavens; but, as bright as it was, the fellow who commanded that schooner required an eye as keen as an albatross and a hand as steady as an iron bar to guide his craft in the direction he was going—too late for either of us to think of hauling off.

"He must, too, have had a thorough knowledge of the reefs and keys, and trusted, perhaps, if he got clear himself, that the corvette, drawing eighteen feet water and ignorant of the channel, might touch something which would throw the game in his hands. Our men had the ropes stretched along the decks and the battery clear on both sides, so as to be ready to wear, or tack, or fire, as our pilot ahead might require.

"The reefs were to leeward of the string of low keys, which made the water comparatively smooth, though the wind still swept strongly over us and sang through the rigging; and it was here the 'Centipede' entered, going like wild pigeons the pair of us. The outer reef had a fair, deep passage, and so had the next; but the inner one presented but one narrow gateway, scarcely wide enough for a ship to scrape through, with the whole reef one uninterrupted fringe of black pointed rocks and roaring white breakers, which toppled over, and boiled and eddied like a thousand whirlpools into the smoother water inshore.

"As the 'Centipede's' stern gave a sharp pitching jerk when she entered this boiling gorge, we saw, in the moonlight, her head-yards laid square, the fore and aft sails flowing in the sheets as she fell off with wide wings and the wind on her quarter, and flew down inside the reef.

"Five minutes after we too entered this maelstrom chasm, and, though the helm was hove hard up, and the after-sails shivered, yet, before the 'Scourge's' bows, going at the rate she was, could turn the sharp angle of that water-gate, her port bilge grated against a coral ledge, and grooved and broomed the planks and copper away like so much sea-weed! But yet that slight graze never stopped us a hair's weight, and, with additional sail, we rushed after our pilot, mile after mile, through reef, ledge, breakers, inlets, and keys, now braced sharp up, and again going free, until at last the fellow, having run us a dance of full ten miles, once more emerged into the open water, close jammed on the wind, steering nearly due east.

"There, Hardy!" exclaimed the commodore, "I am tired of talking; suppose you take up the thread of the yarn. Domino, another bottle of tinta!"



CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE WRECK OF THE "CENTIPEDE."

"Gun bellows forth to gun, and pain Rings out her wild, delirious scream; Redoubling thunders shake the main, Loud crashing falls the shot-rent beam. The timbers with the broadsides strain; The slippery decks send up a steam From hot and living blood; and high And shrill is heard the death-pang cry!"

"She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool; But the cruel rocks they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull."

Piron turned his gaze toward the first lieutenant, moved away the full glasses of wine, which he had never raised to his lips since the commodore began, and, resting his bloodless cheek on his other hand, listened.

"It's vera interesting indeed." "Tear an' ages, boy! Fire away!" quoth the Scotchman and his Milesian crony in a breath.

Hardy threw his arm over the shoulder of Harry Darcantel as if it was a pleasant Corinthian column to lean upon, and breaking off the ashes of his cigar on the rim of a wine-glass which he had specially devoted to that purpose, he forthwith began:

"I am quite confident, gentlemen, that I can not describe what afterward took place so well as Commodore Cleveland, but, at all events, I'll do my best. Nor do I remember very distinctly the events of the night after we got out of the Musketeers Keys; for I was pretty well fagged out myself, and all of us who had the watch below turned in to take the first wink of sleep we could catch for forty hours.

"The next morning, however, when I took the deck, I found the corvette under royals and flying-jib, with a fresh trade wind blowing from about east-northeast, and a smooth sea; though close hauled as we were, and going ten knots, the spray was flying well up the weather leech of the fore-sail. The 'Centipede' was about a mile and a half ahead, jammed on the wind, and trying all she could to eat the wind out of us; but, as the commodore there said at the time, he had thrown that trick away when he cut off eight or ten feet of his fore-mast, and made a brigantine of the craft, so that he could not brace his head-yards sharper, or lie nearer the wind than we did.

"I remember, also, that two or three of the officers and half a hundred of the sailors were very anxious to pitch shot at the chase from the long eighteen in the weather bridle port; but the captain refused, and said we might lose a cable's length or two in yawing off to fire, and it would be better to save the powder until we could slam a broadside into him. But all the while that 'Centipede' was handled and steered in such a thorough seamanlike manner, and proved herself such a beautiful sea-boat, that I doubt if there was a man on board the 'Scourge' who would not have given a year's pay to have taken her whole, and only expended a spare top-mast studding-sail halliards for the necks of her crew.

"From the top-gallant forecastle we could see every thing that took place on the schooner's deck: sometimes a lot of fellows forward reeving some fresh gear, peering about the low bowsprit, or putting on a seizing to a traveler on the jib-stay; with a chap or two aloft stitching a chafing-mat on the lee backstays; and then aft a man shinning up the main shrouds with a tin pot hung around his neck, greasing the jaws of the main gaff, and twitching a wrinkle out of the gaff-top-sail, so that it would lie as flat as this dining-room table set on end.

"But always, from the very first moment we descried her—before the hurricane and afterward—there were two fellows abaft by the taffrail. One a large fat man, in a long dark dress, who appeared at times to be leaning over the rail as if he were sea-sick; and the other a spare, tall-built fellow, who sat there with a quadrant in his hands and smoking cigars, measuring the distance between the two vessels as if he were a government surveyor, and especially appointed to make a hydrographical chart of the Caribbean Sea. Occasionally, too, we could see him approach the binnacle, spread a chart on the deck at his feet, examine it closely with a pair of dividers in his hands, and then he would return to his seat on the taffrail, cigar in his mouth and quadrant to his eye as before.

"Nor were we idle on board the 'Scourge;' for when the breeze lulled we slacked up the lower rigging and stays, got down all extra weight and hamper from the tops, sent the watch below to the berth-deck with a round shot apiece in their hammocks, moved a couple of carronades about the spar-deck till we got the ship in the best sailing trim, and then we went skipping and springing through the water with the elasticity of an India-rubber ball.

"At noon the sailing-master reported the position of the ship to be two hundred and eighty miles from the nearest land, which was the Darien Coast. So all that day and all that night, with a moon to make a lover weep to see, we went bowling after our waspish consort in hopes before long of taking the sting out of her. No kite ever pursued its quarry with a keener eye than we did. No hound ever leaped after a wolf with the froth streaming from his jaws and blood-red thirsty eyes, than did the 'Scourge' chase that infamous pirate. The delay only made our eyes sparkle and our teeth sharper in expectation; for we knew we would have our prey sooner or later, and it was only a bite and a pleasure deferred.

"The next morning and all the day there was no change to speak of in our respective positions. The 'Centipede' went skimming on over the water with every thread of canvas she could spread, reeling over on her side at times when the breeze freshened, while the spray flashed up joyously and sparkled in the sun, leaving a bubbling current of foam in her wake, which, before it had been entirely lost in the regular waves of the sea, the corvette's sharp bows would plunge into, and again make it flash high up to her fore-yard, and then go seething, and hissing, and kissing her black sides until it rippled around her rudder and was lost again in the wake astern.

"And all the time that man sat with a cigar in his mouth on the pirate's taffrail, while Commodore Cleveland there stood with a spy-glass to his eye on the poop of the 'Scourge.'

"You may imagine, gentlemen," continued Hardy, as he again knocked the ashes off his cigar, "that going to sea is attended with some few discomforts, such as battening down the hatches in a sirocco in the Mediterranean off Tripoli; a simoom in the China Seas; a bitter northwest gale off Barnegat, with the rigging and sails frozen as hard as an iceberg; but if a man can catch forty winks of sleep once in a while, whether in a hammock, or on an oak carronade slide with the breech of a gun for a pillow, he may manage to weather through it. But from the moment we first saw that pirate till we saw the last of him, neither the first lieutenant of the 'Scourge' nor the commander of the 'Centipede' once closed their eyes, unless—well, I won't anticipate."

Piron reached over his hand and shook that of his friend Cleveland convulsively.

"Vera weel, mon! vera weel!" "He's the very man to do it!" said Stewart and Burns to Stingo, nodding backward at the commodore.

Another striking contrast to the hand-shaking, virtuous compact between Captain Brand and his friend, the pious padre Ricardo! I wonder if they are shaking hands now! Probably not.

"Gentlemen," resumed Hardy, as he shook the ashes level in his wine-glass, as if he wished to preserve them to clean his teeth with after smoking, "I will not detain you much longer. Both vessels were making great speed, and long before sunset we had been keeping a bright look-out for the land. At last it was reported, trending all around both bows, low and with a trembling mirage of pines and mangroves looming up, and a multitude of rocky keys dead ahead. We were steering directly for Las Mulatas Islands, a cluster then little known to any navigators save, perhaps, the buccaneers of the Gulf of Columbus, and perhaps, too, with the intention of running us just such another dance as our pilot had a night or two before. However, we were again all prepared to explore the unknown reefs; and, moreover, we got the starboard anchor off the bow, and bent the cables to that and the spare anchors amidships, so as to be all ready to moor ship in case our pilot required us to do so. And likewise the cutters were hanging clear from the davits—the same boats which had once before paid a complimentary visit to some of his friends—supposing he would like to entertain us in person.

"The sun went down again in a fiery blaze, and with its last ray there slowly rose to the main truck of the pirate a swallow-tailed black flag, with a white skull and cross-bones in the dark field. It fluttered for a moment out straight and clear, and then twisted itself around the thin mast, never more to be released by hands or halliards! That was the last glimpse those pirates ever caught of the murderous symbol they had so often fought and sailed under; and it was the last sun that a good many aching eyes ever looked upon who were sailing there in that half league of blue water. The moon, however, was riding bright and beaming, as clear as a bell, overhead, and that was all the light we cared for. The 'Centipede,' no doubt, would have preferred no moon at all, with a cloudy sky and a bit of a rain squall, to pursue the intricate navigation before her; but Heaven arranged the atmospheric scenery otherwise.

"'By the deep eight!' sang out the leadsman in the port chains. 'The mark five!' came from the opposite side. 'Another cast, lads—quick!' 'And a half four!' 'Six fathoms, sir!'

"'We must have stirred up the sand, Cleveland,' said the captain; but even as he spoke the man in the starboard chains cried, 'Three fathoms, sir!' and while each instant we expected the ship to bring up all standing, and the masts to go by the board, the other leadsman sung out, joyfully, 'No bottom with the line, sir!'

"Well, we were safely through that bed of coral, doing, no doubt, some trifling damage to the tender shoots and branches, as we flew through a narrow channel, with the waves breaking and moaning on the sandy shores over the keys, out into deep water again.

"Four or five miles beyond stood out a bluff rock, looking in the moonlight like a dozing lion with his paws crossed before him, ready to bound upon any who should approach his lair in the dense jungle of pines and tangled thickets which stood up like a bristling mane on the ridge behind.

"The 'Centipede' was now but a short half-mile ahead of us, her deck alive with men, and manifestly ready for some desperate devilment. On her after rail, too, stood that man, tall and erect, his feet steadied by the cavil of the main boom, a spy-glass to his eye, and looking at the rocky lion now close aboard him, still with a cigar in his mouth; and we thought we could even see the thin puffs of smoke curling around his face. Suddenly, too, we saw the spy-glass whirled around his head, and at the instant the vessel fell dead off before the wind, the great main-sail flew over with a stunning crash and clatter of blocks and sheets as the wind caught it on the other quarter, making the long switch of a mast to spring like a bow, while the weather-shrouds slacked up for a moment in bights, and then came back taut with a twang you might have heard a mile! We could now see, as the space opened behind the rock, another frightful jagged ledge, on which the rollers were heaving in liquid masses high up a precipitous rock, and where the channel was not a cable's length wide, leading into a foaming gloomy inlet, where not even the beams of the moon could penetrate! I heard the captain say, in his old decided way,

"'Now for it, Cleveland! You take the battery, and I'll look out for the ship!'

"Then, gentlemen," said Hardy, with unusual animation, as he waved his right arm aloft with an imaginary cutlass swinging over his head, "came the word 'Fire!'

"Yes, the entire starboard broadside, round shot, grape, and canister, all pointed toward a centre, were delivered with one simultaneous shock—the hurricane a mere cat's-paw in comparison—which shook the corvette as if she had struck a rock, while the smoke and sheets of flame spouted out from the cannon, half hiding the black torrent which gushed forth from so many hoarse throats; and as the roar of the concussion was taken up in terrible echoes from the lion on the rock, a peppering volley of musket-balls from the marines on the poop and forecastle made a barking tenor to the music.

"Meanwhile the helm of the 'Scourge' was hove hard down, and as she just swirled, by a miracle, clear of the ledge under our lee, and came up to the wind with the sails slamming and banging hard enough to send the canvas out of the bolt-ropes, the courses were clewed up, every thing aloft came down by the run; anchor after anchor went plunging to the bottom, and before the cables had fairly begun to fly out of the hawse-holes with their infernal jar and rattle, high above the sounds of flapping sails, snapping blocks, running chains, and what not, came another clear order, 'Fire!'

"Then pealed out the port broadside at a helpless, dismasted hulk within two hundred yards of our beam, rolling like a worm-eaten log on the top of a ruffled broad roller, going to break, in ten seconds, on the ledge, whose pointed rocks stood up like black toothed fangs to grind its prey to atoms! But before the fangs closed upon it our own teeth gave it a shake; and as the breath of our bull-dogs was swept aft by the fresh breeze, we could see the sluggish mass almost rise bodily out of water as it was torn and split by the round iron wedges, the fragments flying up in dark, ragged strips and splinters with squirming ropes around them, looking, in the moonlight, like skeletons of gibbeted pirates tossed, gallows and chains, into the air, and then coming down in dips and splashes into the unforgiving water.

"A minute later, all that was left of the shattered hull fell broadside into the open fangs of the ledge, which ground it with its merciless jaws into toothpicks. But in all the lively music and destruction going on around us—which takes longer to tell than to act—we heard no human voice save one, and that came in a loud, terrified yell amid the crunching roar of the ledge,

"'O Madre! Madre dolorosa!'

"This, gentlemen, was the last sound that came from the piratical schooner 'Centipede.'"



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

VULTURES AND SHARKS.

"Oh ho! oh ho! Above! below! Lightly and brightly they glide and go; The hungry and keen on the top are leaping, The lazy and fat in the depths are sleeping!"

"Ah! well-a-day! What evil looks Had I from old and young; Instead of the cross, the albatross About my neck was hung."

When Hardy had concluded his part of the tale, he stuck the stump of his cigar into the wine-glass of ashes, as if he had no farther use for either, moistened his throat with a bumper of tinta, and almost unconsciously passed his left arm around Harry Darcantel's neck.

Stingo drank two bumpers, as if he had a particularly parched throat; but Paddy Burns and Tom Stewart, strange to relate, never wet their lips, and passed their hands in a careless way across their eyes, as if there were moisture enough there—as, indeed, there was; feeling, as they did, in the founts of their own generous natures, for their dear friend who sat opposite.

Piron's head rested, face downward, on his outspread hands, and a few drops trickled through his close-pressed fingers, but they were not wine. And as he raised his head and looked around the board, where glowing, sympathizing eyes met his, he said, in a low, subdued voice,

"I trust I may thank Heaven for avenging the murder of our child!"

Even as he uttered these words, his gaze rested on the face of Darcantel; and striking the table with a blow that made the glasses jingle, he started back, as he had done on the frigate's quarter-deck, and exclaimed,

"Great God! can it be possible that that boy was saved from the clutches of the drowned pirate!"

Not so fast, good Monsieur Piron—not so fast. Your boy was saved, and Captain Brand was not drowned. So keep quiet for a time, and you shall not only see that bloody pirate, but hear how he departed this life; only keep quiet!

Paddy Burns said, with a violent attempt at indignation, "Wirra, ye spalpeen! is it thinking of old Clinker and his 'arthquake ye are?" While Tom Stewart ejaculated, "Heeh, mon! are you for breaking the commodoor's decanters and wine-glasses, in the belief that ye are the eerthquak yersel?" Stingo, who was more calm, and a less excitable Creole, merely murmured, "Commodore, we want to hear more of what took place, and then what became of you for the past sixteen or seventeen years."

"You shall hear more if you are not tired, gentlemen, though I have very little to add to what Hardy has already related of the 'Centipede.' Steward, let the servants turn in; and brew us, yourself, a light jorum of Antigua punch! Now, then," said Commodore Cleveland, "I'm your man!

"After we had scaled the guns on both sides of the 'Scourge,' as Hardy has told you, the captain thought it an unnecessary trouble to lower the boats to pick up the chips floating about the mouth of the channel; and, besides, it would have been a bit dangerous, since the sea was coming in savagely, boiling about the ship, with a very uncertain depth of water around and under us; and, moreover, we had our hands full the best part of the night in reeving new running-gear, bending a new sail or two that had flapped to pieces when every thing was let go by the run in coming to anchor. However, before morning, we were in cruising trim once more, and ready to cut and run in case it was expedient to lose our ground-tackle, and get out of what we afterward learned was the Garotte Gorge. But by sunrise the wind fell away into a flat calm, and with the exception of the long, triple row of rollers heaving in occasionally from seaward, we lay as snug and quiet as could be.

"After breakfast the quarter boats were lowered, and Hardy took one, and I got in the other, and we pulled in toward the jaws of the channel, between the Lion Rock and the ledge on the opposite side.

"There were still a good many fragments of the wreck, which had escaped the reacting current out to sea, floating about on the water; some of the timbers, too, of the hull were jammed in the black gums of the ledge, shrouded in sea-weed and kelp, as if all had grown there together. Farther on was part of the fore-mast and top-mast, swimming nearly in mid-channel, anchored as it were by one of the shrouds—twisted, perhaps, around a sharp rock below. The top-sail was still fast to the yards, hoisted and sheeted home, and laid in the water transversely to the masts, just as it fell under the raking fire of our first broadside, jerking over the main-top-mast with it.

"A myriad of sea-birds, from Mother Carey's chickens to gulls and cormorants, and even vultures and eagles from the shore, were clustered on the wreck as thick as bees—screaming, croaking, and snapping at each other with their hard beaks and bills, while thousands more were hurrying in from seaward, and either swooped down over the ledge, or tried to find a place on the floating spars.

"The gorge, too, was alive with barracoutas and sharks, leaping out of water, or with their stiff triangular fins cutting just above the surface, and sometimes even grazing the blades of the cutter's oars. I pulled slowly toward the wreck of the fore-mast, and hooked on to the reef-cringle of the fore-top-sail. The birds did not move at our approach, and one old red-eyed vulture snapped on the polished bill of the boat-hook, leaving the marks of his beak in the smooth iron. Down in the clear green depths, too, the water was alive with ravenous fish, and we could see at times hundreds of them with their heads fastened on to some dark object, rolling it, and biting it, and pulling every way, with now and then the glance of a clean-picked bone shining white in the limpid water as the mass was jerked out of our sight.

"The bowmen, however, attracted my attention, and one of them sang out, as he pointed with his finger, 'I say, Mr. Cleveland, here's the captain and his priest lying in the belly of the top-sail!'

"I walked forward, while the men fired a few pistols to scare away the birds, and looked in. There, about a foot below the water, lay one drowned man and half the body of another, who had evidently been cut in twain by a twenty-four pound shot at the stomach, leaving only a few revolting shreds of entrails dangling beneath the carcass. The other corpse was a large, burly, fat man, wrapped in a black cassock, with a knotted rope to confine it at the midriff, and around his thick bare neck was a string of black beads, holding a gold and ebony crucifix, pendent in the water. The eyes of the one with half a body had been picked out by the gulls, but he still possessed a fang-like tusk, sticking through a hare-lip under a fringe of wiry mustache, which gave me a tolerable correct idea of his temper even without seeing his eyes. The truck and shivered stump of the main-top-mast, too, with the piratical flag still twisted around it, lay across his chest; but, as we approached, an eagle seized it in his beak, and, tearing it in tattered shreds, flew aloft, with the remains of the parted halliards streaming below his talons.

"The large lump rolling slowly over beside him had the crown of the head shaved, and the mouth and eyes were wide staring open, as if it was chanting forth a misericordia for his own soul. As I stood gazing at these revolting objects, and while the men were firing pistols and slashing the oars and boat-hooks around to drive away the greedy birds, a huge pelican, unmindful of powder or ash, made one dashing swoop into the sail, and as he came up and spread his broad pinions—nearly as broad as the sail itself—he held in his pouch the crucifix from the padre's neck, and as he slowly flapped his great wings and sailed away, with the beads dropping pit-a-pat-pat on the glassy surface of the water, a cloud of cormorants, gulls, and vultures took after him to steal his plunder.

"At the same time the sharks—many of them resting their cold, sharp noses on the very leech of the top-sail—waiting like hungry dogs for a bone, with a thousand more diving and cutting in the water beneath, at last cut through the canvas belly of the sail, and, before you could think, the floating corpses were within their serrated jaws. In another moment the bodies rose again to the surface outside the sail and wreck; then another dash from the monsters, and a greedy dive and peck from the birds; a few bubbles and shreds of black threads, and that was the last of those wretches until the sea shall give up its dead.

"As for Hardy, he pulled higher up the gorge, and examined the rocks and pools on both sides, but saw nothing living or dead, and we both returned to the ship."

Had Dick Hardy landed at the flat rock where the eddy swept in under the Lion's paws, he might have seen the footprint of a man, with a straw slipper in it; and following the track a few yards farther, he would have passed his sword through a villain lying bleeding in a mangrove thicket; and found, too, in his belt, snugly stowed away, a lot of gleaming jewels, with a sapphire gem of priceless value on the finger of his bloody hand. But never mind, Hardy! You will hear more of that man one of these days, and you will have no cause for regrets—though he will, perhaps; and, meanwhile, let him wander in quest of fresh villainies over Spanish South America.

"Well, gentlemen," resumed Commodore Cleveland, "although I have doubts whether the mangled carcass we saw in the sail was the captain of that notorious 'Centipede,' yet I felt confident at the time, and do now, that it was scarcely possible for him or a man of his crew to have escaped our fire and the water and rocks combined. So that evening, when the land-wind made, we tripped anchor and sailed away from the coast of Darien."

"Come, my friends," said Piron, in a low, tremulous voice, rising as he spoke, "we must not push Cleveland too far to-night, for it is getting late, you know, and they keep early hours on board men-of-war."

"No hurry, Piron! I'll talk to you all night, if you have the patience to listen to me. No? Then I'll have the boat manned." He touched a bell-rope which hung over his head, and the cabin door opened. "Orderly, my compliments to the officer of the watch, and desire him to call away the barge."

While some of the gentlemen in the forward cabin left the table, and stood about in groups chatting till the boat was reported, Piron put his arm around the commodore's belt, and they moved aft into the starboard stateroom. Little Mouse was lying sound asleep on the elegant cot, with all his clothes on, but with a smile on his lips, and dreaming, maybe, of the dear widowed mother he would one of those days make proud of him.

"Cleveland, my old friend, tell me more of that young Darcantel!"

"Hist! Piron, don't wake little Tiny! There's nothing to tell more than he is my adopted nephew, and the son of the gentleman who occupies that stateroom opposite. But when we go out to Escondido I'll tell you about his father, who has led a very adventurous life."

"Well, good-night! You will bring young Darcantel with you, and this little rogue, too, here in the cot. My wife and her sister will be delighted to see you all. Good-night!"

As the "Monongahela's" bell struck eight for midnight, the commodore's guests got in the barge and pulled toward the shore.

At the same time, a light gig, with handsome Harry Darcantel, went alongside the "Rosalie," and Commodore Cleveland turned into his friend's cot opposite, leaving small Mr. Mouse to sleep his dream out till morning; while, as the barge ran up to the landing at Kingston Harbor, and a gold ounce was slipped into the old coxswain's honest paw, what did they all think about? Good-night!



CHAPTER XXXIX.

ESCONDIDO.

"They bore her far to a mountain green, To see what mortal never had seen; And they seated her high on a purple sward, And bade her heed what she saw and heard; And note the changes the spirits wrought, For now she lived in the land of thought."

"'Twixt Africa and Ind, I'll find him out, And force him to restore his purchase back, Or drag by the curls to a foul death, Cursed as his life."

Hidden in a cleft of the hills of Jamaica, fifteen hundred feet above that blue tropical sea below, on the brow of a cool valley, where that bounding stream of white water rushes from the tall peak in the sky in tiny cataracts, till it forms a pool there, held in by the smooth rim of rocks, where the cane-mill is lazily turning its overshot wheel, with the spray flying off in streaming mist, and the happy blacks stacking the sugar-cane in even fagots as they unlade the huge carts with solid wheels cut out of a single drum of a cotton-tree; the six or eight yoke of oxen ahead ruminating under the shade of the tropical foliage, with never a switch to their tails; while the lively young sea-breeze comes flurrying up the valley, whistling among the coffee bushes below, bending the standing cane on the slopes, rattling the tamarinds, cocoa-nuts, and plantains, and then climbing with noisy wings up the mountain, is lost with a whirl in the heavy cloud which obscures the lofty peak.

Below the mill, where the mule-path crosses the foaming torrent by the shaky bridge, which stands on cocoa-nut stilts, and never yet has been thrown down by an earthquake, nestling under a precipitous crag, stood the mountain seat of Escondido. Vines and parasitical plants, mingled with scarlet creeping geraniums, made a living wall of dewy green and red on the face of the hoary rock, falling over here and there at some projecting acclivity in leafy torrents, and then forming a glowing green cornice along the topmost edges of the height.

The buildings stood on a flat esplanade below, looking down the gorge as from the apex of a triangle, and taking in the overseer's houses on the plantations, with their cone-shaped roofs, the fields of cane and coffee groves, the cataract between, down to the white snowy beach at the sea-shore, and the blue water crested by waves as far as the sight could reach.

The main house was square—standing on stilts, too, like the shaky bridge—the lower part fenced in by straight bamboos, of one story, with a broad roomy veranda going all round, where half a dozen grass hammocks were slung between the windows which opened into the dwelling. A great airy saloon and dining-room faced the valley, while six or eight cool bedchambers looked out from the rear up at the green wall of the precipice, and down on the sparkling stream of the mill.

But there were no loopholes for musketry, nor vaults and dungeons.

The sun had long passed the tall peaks of the blue mountains above, and the shadows had fallen down the valley until even the patch of white pebbly cove at the shore had become dim; and no sounds were heard save the rustling of the sea-breeze, the splash of the torrent as it fell off from the rickety old wheel of the cane-mill, mingled with the shrill cries and songs of the negroes as they unloaded the carts.

Yes; but there were other sounds—the low, sweet tones of women's voices—inside the villa of Escondido. Two lovely matrons were sitting within that lofty saloon, hand clasped in hand, and gazing with glowing pride upon a lovely girl, who waved lithe as a lily on its stem before them.

It is about seventeen years since we last saw this charming trio. And now look at them, old bachelors, and tell me if, while old Time has been scraping the hair off your own selfish heads, and pinching the noses, too, of the ancient maids beside you, has not the scything old wretch spared these lovely matrons? Look at their rounded forms, those soft dimpled cheeks, and those bands of brown tresses, kissing the pear-shaped ears before they are looped up in one magnificent knot of satin at the back of the head. Look at them, you miserable old procrastinators, and then kneel down before the ancient damsels you have sneered at, even if they have the pelican gout and a crow's-foot at the corners of their eyes! They are better than you are, any day; so bear a hand, send for the parson—and now stand back.

But come here, my young gallants, and take a peep at that Bordelaise demoiselle standing before those fair matrons. Strange to say, she is nearly a blonde, with large blue eyes, so very blue that—fringed with lashes that cast a shade over the cheek—they seem almost black. Then, too, that low, pure forehead, with great plaits of hair going round and round her elegant head like a golden turban, and thin hoops of rings quivering in the pearl-tipped ears. Tall and waving in figure, as maidens are; with slim, arched feet, dimpled at the ankle; and round, tapering fingers too, with a wrist so plump and soft that no manacles of bracelets could press it without slipping off the ivory hand. Dressed she was in a light mousseline, coyly cowering in loose folds around her budding bosom to the slender waist, where, clasped by a simple buckle of mother-o'-pearl, it fell flowing in gauzy, floating waves to her feet. Look at her, my gallants, for she is Rosalie!

"They are coming to-day, my aunt; and Uncle Jules says that our dear old Captain Blunt has just arrived at Kingston, and is coming with them."

"What else, my daughter?"

The girl held a letter before her face, maybe to hide a little blush which suffused her cheeks.

"Why, mamma, he writes that the spring-cart, with Banou, was to start overnight with the 'traps'—that means trunks, I suppose—and that—"

"What, Rosalie?"

"That there is a handsome young officer, the nephew of Commodore Cleveland—merci, mamma! some of Uncle Jules's nonsense!"

No such great nonsense, after all, mademoiselle, when your uncle Piron tells you to keep that fluttering little heart safe within your bodice, for there are thieves in blue jackets in the island of Jamaica. Strange, too, as she spoke—with her animated face, large blue eyes, and graceful, wavy figure—how much she resembled both those lovely women, with their darker coloring, who sat smiling sweetly upon her.