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and wall were solid; no hint of a trap-door, no sign of a secret hidingplace. Whether the discovery of a chest of bullion, or a sack full of ecclesiastical furniture in precious ore would have served to reconcile us to being marooned, I don't know; but on looking back I cannot but think that we deserved some such reward, and am still weak enough to imagine that had I hunted more diligently I might have met with it.

There was no chimney to the kitchen, but on making up a fire of wood, dry grass, and the sweepings, so to speak, of these rooms, in order to test the furnace, I found that the smoke passed out freely through the open skylight, whilst despite the apparent want of draught, the fire burnt briskly enough to roast us a leg of mutton, had we had such a thing. I should have been glad to take up my abode that same night in these secret chambers, for I could see my way to as comfortable a bed of leaves and grass, with a rug for a sheet and another for a coverlet, as I needed to lie on, with promise besides of escape from the mosquitoes and the cold clip of the land-crab's jaws. But Miss Grant's soft shake of the head determined me to say no more about it. It was her humour to sleep another night in the hammock under the trees, and it was my duty to be near her. I thought to myself, should the bell toll to-night, her mind may come more willingly to the underground shelter to-morrow. For my part it seemed like mocking luck to lie all night with nothing but blue atmosphere betwixt the trembling stars and one's body, when there was as good a roof for one as old mother earth could supply close at hand. But he must be a clever man who can even dimly guess at but a portion of what goes to a woman's timidity and reluctance.

I was mightily glad when sundown came. After the fierce glare of the day the evening fell upon us sweet as a blessing, with its dewy richness and coolness of air and the hush of the discordant voices of the island.

on the pre

We sat or strolled, as vious night, till the moon was high, talking of Rio, of what my cousin would be thinking, of the probable fate of the Iron Crown, of our prospect of escape, and a score of such matters. Once, on the sheer rim of the sheet of glory lying under the moon, we both thought we could make out a black speck, and I never could have imagined how wildly passionate was the desire for deliverance in us bothso smoothly would we talk of our rescue, so quiet was the face we had put upon our distress-until, as we stood gazing with our hearts in our eyes at the extremity of the silver wake with the purple gloom lifting like the banks of a river to it on either side, I felt her hand trembling in mine, while my breath came and went as thick, dry, and difficult as though a poison worked in me. That it was a ship we neither of us could say. Sometimes we fancied we saw it, then it would go, then seemed to blacken out again into a tiny spot. So dead was the calm the lightest craft could scarce have floated the distance of a fathom in an hour. There was something almost of a physical burthen in the profound, stirless tranquillity that seemed to come weighing down with the fine clear dusk of the night. You almost blessed the crickets for their bell-like chirping, and bent the ear to the delicate ripple of surf for the relief you got out of its soft simmering noise. But let it have been a ship or fancy, 'twas all the same to The spangled blue of the heavens went down with its stars to the lustrous sea-line, smoothing it there to a flawless rim; and Miss Grant let fall my hand with a deep sigh, and a sudden look of grief at me in the moonlight, for which there was no answer but silence.

us.

However, partly with the wish to distract her mind, and partly because of the necessity for such a thing, I thought I would see if there were any craw-fish to be obtained; so first of all I cut a bough from a tree which I had previously observed to be of a resinous

nature, and on putting fire to it found that it made just such a torch as I needed. I then fashioned a shawl into a sort of bag, which I requested Miss Grant to hold, desiring her also to take her stand close by the wash of the water on the beach, ready to pick up and pop into the shawl such fish as I might have the luck to capture; then turning up my trousers to above my knees, I waded a little distance into the sea, not without some anxiety regarding my toes, for I knew there would be plenty of crabs hereabouts, big and powerful, with the jaws almost of a young shark in their gripping and cleaving qualities. The smoky flame of my torch threw a yellow illumination through the water to the bottom of it, and after waiting a little I was rewarded by the sight of several black objects crawling like lizards to my legs out of the darkness. I dipped briskly, and in a few minutes had chucked a good round score of craw-fish on to the beach, and as fast as they fell Miss Grant picked them up, till the improvised bag writhed to the movements of the creatures as though it were something living in her hand. There was some labour in the occupation; but the water circled cool to my knees, the breath of it floated refreshingly to the face, and flinging away the smouldering remains of my torch I waded ashore, brisk as though from a bath, and lighted a cigar with immense relish of the fumes of the tobacco. I dropped the bundle of craw-fish down the hole that led to the underground rooms, and sat for a long while with Miss Grant; our camp-stools in the heart of the ivory whiteness of the tract on which I had slept last night, and on which I was again to sleep. Occasionally my companion would look a little nervously towards the forest. Now that the silent night had come, thoughts of the mysterious bell-ringing troubled her afresh. Since it was impossible for the bell to ring itself, she said, it must have been tolled by human agency of some sort. No bird or beast alighting upon or

thrusting against it could have produced the varied ringing we had heard, and consequently she was certain there was a man hidden in the wood.

"Why should he hide?" said I, wanting to reassure her, for some hours of moonlight and gloom yet lay betwixt us and the daybreak.

"For fear of us, perhaps," she answered.

"If that be so," said I, "would not he be mad to make his presence known by ringing the bell?" She could not answer this. "Besides," continued I, "where would he hide himself? I searched the forest pretty narrowly. "Tis true he might have a lodging in the hollow of a tree; but you can't reconcile any motive that a man would have in concealing himself, with his lusty ringing of a bell at midnight-raising about the most alarming clamour that human ingenuity could hit upon."

"Then, Mr. Musgrave, you wish me to believe that the bell rang of its own accord, or that it was struck by some spirit-hand?"

This silenced me in my turn. For my own part, I could not make head or tail of the matter, though, spite of the clear expression of human agency that I had found in the changes of the performance of the mysterious bellringer, I would have been willing to bet all I was worth that I was the only man on that island, as Miss Aurelia was the only woman. But it was not a thing to bother ourselves too much about. It was an odd oceanpuzzle, which grew a bit wild with the deepening of the night and the thickening out of the dusky shadows of the little forest to the westerly drawing down of the moon. But my mind was too greatly worried with other considerations to give it heed enough to render me restless on its account.

Whilst we sat conversing I spied the black shape of a turtle creeping out of the creek, with the moon sparkling on its wet shell. "I must have that lady," said I; "she looks

but a tortoise, and a small one at that." I fetched the handspike I had manufactured that day to prize open the skylight in the sand, and then waiting till the creature had got a good distance from the water's edge, I made for it, and, with more dexterity than I should have believed myself capable of, slipped my pole fair between the flippers, and with a hearty spring turned the thing fair on to its back. I then opened my knife and cut its throat, feeling as remorseful through the horror of the needful operation as a conscience-stricken murderer, despite my perceiving how needlessly inhuman it would have been to let the poor creature lie all night in the torment of its capsized posture, only to decapitate it next morning after all. It was a small hawk's billed turtle, I believe weighing less than one hundred pounds, or I should never have been able to deal with it singlehanded. I returned with a guilty feeling of blood upon my head to Miss Grant, and told her what I had done.

"How shipwreck-to call our condition shipwreck," said I, "forces one's hand! I should have thought myself no more capable of murdering yonder creature than of slaughtering an ox. How much of what is ignoble, of what is purely animal comes out of one in stresses of this kind! A man, to remain only a little lower than the angels, should be luxuriously fed and housed, I think. His vileness grows with his needs. The nature of beasts remains the same in essentials, whether they be pursy with food or mere ribs of famine. But bring human nature down to such destitution as an open boat, for instance, expresses, without a crumb of bread or a thimbleful of fresh water, and how base it will show in its instincts!"

"And all this," she exclaimed, smiling, "because you have killed a turtle! Yet I dare say your appreciation of the god-like qualities of man in you would not suffer through your chasing a hare in company with twenty horsemen over miles of ground,

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I brought the face of my watch to the moonlight. "Twenty minutes past twelve," said I.

"Have you my pistol?" I had it in my pocket. I loaded, primed, and handed it to her; she adjusted it in her belt as on the previous night, then removed her hat, and gave me her hand, as her manner always was ere retiring to rest. I pressed my lips to it in the old-fashioned salute, grieved to the heart to think of the hardships that had befallen this brave and beautiful girl, and deeply moved by the pathos I found in her uncomplaining acceptance of our sorrowful and seemingly hopeless condition.

When she was fairly in her hammock, I rigged the mosquito-curtain over her, and turned away from the beauty of her face, showing marble in the transparency under which she lay, with a feeling that made me almost wild at heart for a little with a sense of betrayal of the trust whose obligation, confound it! grew more imperious in proportion as it taxed my weakness. I threw a rug upon the sand, rolled up a coat for a bolster, saw to my pistols, threw the mosquito-net over my head, and lay down. This was our second night on the island. I felt the solitude of the place and the dismalness and melancholy of our look-out far more keenly than I had on the previous day. There was something of novelty about our situation during the first few hours which worked with a little quality of buoyancy in the spirits; but that was gone, and there was nothing now between the heart and the crushing burden of imprisonment. The fire-flies swarmed in brilliant constellations, the tingling horn of the mosquito sounded shrill against my ear, odd midnight notes of dreaming fowl broke into the silence out of the inland dusk, down upon the ivory of the creek-side lay

my slaughtered turtle, with a look in it of a great stain of ink upon the moon-whitened sand that importunately and unpleasantly sent my thoughts straying away to the murder of Bothwell and the ugly blotch on the cabinfloor. The brig, the mutineers, the loss of Gordon and the men, Broadwater's mysterious disappearance why, these were things already growing dreamlike, so heavy was the thrust this last experience of ours gave even to the freshest memories, sending the latest incidents reeling back into a sort of antiquity, till, on my oath, it seemed as long as twenty years ago since we had embarked on the Iron Crown in the Downs.

I was restless and hot, and was in the act of sitting up with the design of lifting the mosquito-curtain high enough to bring a cigar to my lips, when the bell hidden away in the blackness behind us began to toll.

"There, Mr. Musgrave! There it is again!" cried Miss Grant, almost hysterically, and in a breath she had sprang from her hammock and was alongside of me, with her hand on my shoulder, listening. The ringing was much the same as on the night before -first a slow and solemn tolling, making one think of some mortuary bell timing the melancholy pacing of a funeral winding along a cyprusshadowed path to an ugly rent in the earth; then after a pause, as though the ringer had halted to refresh himself with a drink, a hasty clattering, a most alarming clamorous vibration; then the dirge-like chiming again, followed on by all sorts of beatings, fast and slow.

"Will you say now," cried Miss Grant, holding my hand tightly, "that there is no man there?"

"Be it man or devil," I exclaimed, "ghost or goblin, it is a riddle we must solve for our peace' sake. Wait you here."

"What do you mean to do?" she cried, still clinging to me.

"Why, since it is impossible to see, to let drive in the direction of the sound

anyhow, and listen for some squeal to follow, that we may know the ringing is not an hallucination, for I protest to Heaven, the incredibility of such a thing is enough to make one think one's self mad for hearing it.

She dropped my hand, and I walked towards the trees with a pistol in either fist. She followed me, holding her own little weapon, but the dense tangle, I knew, would stop her presently. I had no intention of penetrating the wood by the road I had taken when the morning sun shone brilliant. If it were dark then, it would be blacker than thunder now, which necessarily increased the astonishment I laboured under at hearing the bell; for unless the thing that rang it lived within a pace of it, its power of being able to find it amid that blackness was as astonishing as the sound itself. Yet all this while the chimes continued. Whatever the ringer might be, its mood seemed merrier on this than on the last night. It rang heartily, with a curious suggestion of enjoyment in the sound produced. The disturbed birds sent a hundred remonstrant cries, yells, and whistlings from the trees, which apparently merely increased the appetite of the ringer for his labour, for 'tis not in mortal pen to express the preternatural wildness, melancholy, and I may say horror, of the sound of that secret ringing echoing through the island out of the central midnight fastness, and dying away in ghostly tones far out upon the silent sea. I was as angry as I was bewildered. The character of the sound staggered my doubts of there being a man there. It seemed impossible that anything but a human hand should produce such noise. Closely followed by my companion, I skirted the trees to that thin scattering of them whence I had emerged after my morning's hunt, and where I had tripped over the ring in the sand, from which point I thought that I could better collect the bearings of the bell. Miss Grant soon came to a stand, her clothing rendering the growth impenetrable to her.

"Oh, if I were only dressed as you are, Mr. Musgrave!" she exclaimed, in a voice so charged with bitter vexation that it was almost like hearing her sob. "Do not venture too far. Be cautious for my sake. What shall I do if I am left alone here?"

"I will not go far," said I;" stand you in this black shadow. In the haze of the moon you will be able to see anything that may run this way. Let fly at it, will you, should it come. Only please take care not to shoot

me.

With that I left her, and drove with trudging steps through the coarse, wiry undergrowth, helped somewhat by recollection of the road I had taken in the morning, and aided also by the sound of the bell. However, I had not advanced fifty paces when I found further progress impossible. There was no question however that the chimes came from the bell I had inspected in the morning, so I levelled a pistol at the blackness in the direction whence the sounds were coming, and fired. The trees all about me glanced out yellow to the flame; the bell instantly ceased; but one had to listen to make sure, so

deafening was the noise among the branches of the terrified creatures roosting up there. I levelled a second pistol and fired again, with a renewal of the distracting outbreak overhead, rolling in a wave of discordant uproar, so wild that the effect upon the hearing defies language. I waited a little, eagerly hearkening. The ringing had ended. The forest noises died away, and in a few minutes you heard nothing but the familiar croakings and chirrup ings, chiefly out in the open. There were too many trees in the road to render it likely I had hit the ringer; indeed I had not fired with that idea. But I thought that whatever it was that rang the bell might come sneakingly my way, and I strained my hearing for any sound resembling the rustling of the coarse growth pressed by the foot; but nothing of the sort was audible, so I returned to Miss Grant, and walked with her back to where the hammock was.

Well, it was a mystery not to be solved by wondering at it. I own I slept but little that night through thinking of it, whilst Miss Grant next morning confessed that she had not closed her eyes.

(To be continued.)

FATHER DAMIEN.

No golden dome shines over Damien's sleep:

A leper's grave upon a leprous strand,

Where hope is dead, and hand must shrink from hand,
Where cataracts wail toward a moaning deep,

And frowning purple cliffs in mercy keep

All wholesome life at distance, hath God planned

For him who led the saints' heroic band,

And died a shepherd of Christ's exiled sheep.

O'er Damien's dust the broad skies bend for dome,

Stars burn for golden letters, and the sea

Shall roll perpetual anthem round his rest:

For Damien made the charnel-house life's home,
Matched love with death; and Damien's name shall be
A glorious benediction, world-possest.

H. D. RAWNSLEY.

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