lashed the helm, lowered a boat from the lee quarter, where their motions could not be seen by the vessel in chase, and jumping into it, pulled under cover of their own brig towards the shore. The fire soon caught the dry and pitchy deck and light bulwarks, and spread with fearful rapidity. The unhappy young man on the yard looked down on the scene without the power to release himself from his dreadful place of captivity. Even could he have loosened the knot which bound him there, and which was but drawn the tighter the more he struggled, his situation would have been little improved. The deck was already a sea of fire. It had caught the sails, and towered up in a pyramid far above his head. He writhed in agony and strove to shriek, but it seemed as if the flames which roared around him had scorched his throat, and deprived him of the power of utterance. He felt his flesh shrivel and crack in the intense heat, and his garments as he moved chafed the skin from his body. The sails, however, were quickly consumed or blown off in blazing fragments into the sea; but the wind, which then visited his cheek, brought no relief, but added tenfold anguish to his blistered flesh. He turned his seared eyeballs towards the shore, and they fell on the boat, midway, the inmates of which were rendered visible, and their savage features shone with horrible distinctness, in the glare of the burning vessel. His foe, towering above the rest, stood in the after part, and his face was turned

with an expression of fiendish joy, as it seemed, towards his writhing victim, whose agonized motions he could discern in the hellish light. From this maddening sight the tortured wretch turned towards the pursuing vessel-but she had descried the boat and changed her course! All hope of rescue now died within him. The flames were fast eating into the mast at the deck, and streaming up the dry and greasy spar with appalling fierceness, while their roar and crackling sounded to his frenzied ear like the exultation of infernal spirits waiting for their prey. The shrouds, too, were on fire, and the pitch that boiled out from them added to the fury of the conflagration. The victim saw that his fate was near at hand, and ceased to struggle. Again the heat came up with scorching power, and a thick pitchy cloud of smoke wrapt him for a moment in its suffocating folds. It passed away and he could see again. The shrouds were quite consumed, save a few blazing ends which waved round him like the whips of furies; and the flames, which had lingered for a moment round the thick body of rigging at the mast head, were now climbing the topmast, and had almost reached the spot where he was bound. At this moment the brig rolled to windward, and he felt the mast tremble and totter like a falling tree. She slowly righted and lurched to leeward-the mast cracked and snapped-he felt his body rush through the air-the spar fell hissing into the ocean-the cold water closed over his scorched and shuddering body—he threw out his

arms and made one more frantic effort to release himself the knot that bound him suddenly gave way-and-But we will let him tell the result in his own words.

On the following morning, the young men was seated in the same apartment of the fisherman's cabin, to which we have already introduced the reader. Writing materials were before him, and his pen was busy in addressing a letter to a friend. We have an author's privilege of looking over his shoulder, and take the liberty to transcribe the following passage of his epistle :

The Letter.

"I shall return to town immediately, for I do not find the sea-air is of any advantage to my health; and this sudden change of weather will render the hot streets of the city endurable, while here I am actually shivering with cold. My malady is not one, my dear friend, which sea-air or change of climate can remove. It is seated, not in the body, but in the mind; and wherever I go I meet with something to remind me of my loss. Even the simple but kind wife of the humble fisherman with whom I lodge, does or says something twenty times a-day to make me feel what I have suffered in the untimely death of my poor Eliza. No matter-I shall soon follow her. "The limits of a letter will not allow me to tell you of a strange adventure I had last night. I was both burned to death and drowned; but the particu

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lars of this sad accident I must reserve for our meeting. You will conjecture that this happened in a dream-and it was the wildest dream that the fancy of a sleeper ever framed. It is curious how much real torture, and for how long a time, one may experience in a half hour's slumber. I have a very vivid idea, now, of what the martyrs must have suffered, and am amazed at their fortitude. My dream was suggested, probably, by a conversation among some sailors, which the wind wafted to my ears, though it was not intended for them. You will smile when I tell you out of what slender materials my sleeping and feverish brain created a conflagration and an ocean. When I waked, in all the horror of a double death by fire and water, I found that in my slumber I had overthrown a pitcher into my lap, and that my feet were toasting something too close to a fire, which had blazed up after I fell asleep. I ought to mention that I had taken a rather larger draught than usual of my opiate mixture. Of such shreds dreams are made."

I AM not what I have been !-pain
Has stolen the roses from my cheek,

And never can I know again

The health their hues were wont to speak.

I am not what I have been !-care

Has left its traces on my brow;

What matters it?-bright smiles are there, To hide the gloom that lies below.

I am not what I have been !-Time

His work of wasting too has done;

My life is in its earliest prime,

But ah! my heart's glad youth is gone.

I am not what I have been!-life
For me has lost its every charm;
I'm weary of wild passion's strife-
I can no longer brave its storm.

I am not what I have been!-Fate
On me has laid her heaviest doom;
And now in patience I await

Her last, her kindliest gift—a tomb!