cabin of the fisherman on the shore was already undistinguishable from the dark background of hills, and these also had lost their distinctness of outline, and were fast vanishing in the gloom. A cry of "sail ho!" from aloft first broke the silence. It was not necessary to follow this announcement with the usual questions. The vessel reported rushed into plain sight, as she opened a point of land that had concealed her. As the eye of the commander of the brigantine rested on her, a tremor shook his frame. For a moment he stood studying her through his glass; then dashing it on deck, he addressed rapid orders to his crew. All hands were immediately busied in making sail and working ship. Though the wind whistled wildly through the cordage, a ring-tail was added to the mainsail, and every sail that would draw was set. It was soon evident that the strange vessel was chasing the brigantine, and it became necessary that all hands should assist in working the latter, to which end the lookouts were called from forward and aloft.

"Here! let this trembling wretch go on the fore-topsail-yard," cried the commander. "6 He can report if any other sail heaves in sight, or at any rate he will there be out of the way. What, coward! do you shrink? Nay, then, by heaven! you shall go. Here, Tom, take this pistol, and follow him up the rigging. If he refuses or falters, shoot him dead." The poor object of this persecution shuddered, and cold drops of sweat bedewed his forehead; but opposition would have been worse than useless, and in the hope that some turn might yet release him from this dreadful thraldom, he began to climb the shrouds. He trembled so violently, that this would not have been an easy task had the brig been lying at rest; but she was now pitching and rolling heavily, and it seemed to him, as he was swept to and fro through the air, that the next motion would inevitably hurl him into the sea. At last, however, he reached the topsail-yard, and attempted to seat himself on the dizzy perch. But he looked down, and saw the waves whirling and boiling below, while the narrow and unsteady vessel seemed to glide away from beneath him, and the mast to fall over of its own weight. His head grew giddy; a deadly sickness came over his fainting soul, and he would have pitched head foremost to the deck, had he not been upheld by the strong arm of the man who ascended with him. An expression of sympathy

struggled to his hard face, and seeing that the prisoner, if left to himself, would soon lose his hold and be dashed to pieces, he fastened him to the topmast, by passing a bunt gasket strongly round his body.

The strange vessel in the meantime was fast overhauling the brigantine. In vain the latter crowded sail. It but buried her deeper in the sea, without increasing her speed. She next attempted to weather on the pursuer, and braced every thing as sharp up as it could be hauled; but the stranger lay as close to the wind as the chase, and that expedient was also vain. The brig tried the pursuer's sailing on all tacks, in hope to find her weak on some point, and thus obtain an advantage. She squared away; she braced first on one tack, and then on the other; she tried her with the wind on the bow, a-beam, on the quarter, every way-and every way the stranger outsailed her. The gale was now blowing a piping note, and the scud dispersing before it, allowed the moon to shine down between the higher clouds. The commander of the brigantine called his crew aft, and addressed a few earnest words to them. The conference lasted but an instant, when the men were seen hurrying forward, and directly after issued from the caboose, each bearing a blazing faggot in his hand. With these they set fire to the vessel in various places; then 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 reef, 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 leewardthe 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 man 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 aday 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 particulars 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 Iwas 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.”

the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments, from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to my Lord Brougham. The worst effect of a goodhumoured expose will be to raise a laugh at the expense of poor humanity, or a merited smile at our own dulness and mistaken sense of the ridiculous.

To commence with the Ancient Poets. -The ghosts in Homer are afraid of swords; yet Sibylla tells Æneas, in Virgil, that the thin habit of spirits was beyond the force of weapons.

In painting alone we have a rich harvest. Burgoyne, in his Travels, notices a painting in Spain where Abraham is preparing to shoot Isaac with a pistol!

There is a painting at Windsor of Antonio Verrio, in which he has introduced himself, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Bap. May, surveyor of the works, in long periwigs, as spectators of Christ's healing the sick.

In the Luxenburg is a picture of Reubens, in which are the queen-mother in council, with two Cardinals and Mercury.

There was also in the Houghton Hall Collection, Velvet Brughel's Adoration of the Magi, in which were a multitude of figures, all finished with the greatest Dutch exactness. The Ethiopian King is dressed in a surplice with boots and spurs, and brings for a present a gold model of a modern ship.

N. Poussin's celebrated painting of Rebecca at the Well, has the whole back ground decorated with Grecian architecture.

The same artist, in his picture of the Deluge, has painted boats, not then invented. St. Jerome, in another place, with a clock by his side, a thing unknown in that saint's days.

A painter of Toledo represented the three wise men of the East coming to worship, and bringing their presents to our Lord upon his birth at Bethlehem, as three Arabian or Indian kings; two of them are white, and one of them black; but, unhappily, when he drew the latter part of them kneeling, their legs being necessarily a little intermixed, he made three black feet for the negro king, and but three white feet for the two white kings; and yet never discovered the mis.

take till the piece was presented to the king, and hung up in the great church.

The monks of a certain monastery at Messina exhibited with great triumph a letter written by the Virgin Mary with her own hand. Unluckily, this was not, as it might have been, written on the ancient papyrus, but on paper made of rags. On some occasion a visitor, to whom this was shewn, observed, with affected solemnity, that the letter involved also a miracle, for the paper on which it was written was not in existence till several hundred years after the Virgin had ascended into heaven.

In the church of St. Zacharia, at Venice, is the picture of a Virgin and Child, whom an angel is entertaining with an air upon the violin!

So also in the College library of Aberdeen, to a very neat Dutch missal are appended elegant paintings on the margin, of angels appearing to the shepherds, with one of them playing on the bagpipes.

There is a picture in a church of Bruges, that puts not only all chronology, but every thing else out of countenance. It is the marriage of our Saviour with St. Catherine of Sienna. St. Dominic, the Patron of the Church, marries them! the Virgin Mary joins their hands; and, to crown the anachronism, King David plays the harp at the wedding!

Albert Durer represented an angel in a flowered petticoat, driving Adam and Eve from Paradise.

In a picture painted by F. Chello della Puera, the Virgin Mary is placed on a velvet sofa, playing with a cat and a paroquet, and about to help herself to coffee from an engraved coffee-pot.

Paul Veronese placed Benedictine fathers and Swiss soldiers among his paintings from the Old Testament.

A painter, intending to describe the miracle of the fishes, listening to the preaching of St. Anthony of Padua, painted the lobsters which were stretching out of the water, red! having probably never seen them in their natural state. Being asked how he could justify this anachronism, he extricated himself, by observing, that the whole affair was a miracle, and that thus the miracle was made still greater.

In the Notices des MSS. du Roi VI. 120, in the illuminations of a Manuscript Bible at Paris, under the Psalms are two persons playing at cards; and under Job and the Prophets are coats of arms and a windmill!

In the collection of the French King there is a celebrated picture, in which our Saviour is represented at table in the castle of Emmaus with two of his disciples, one with a slouched hat, with broad brims hanging over his back, and a huge chaplet round his waist. They are served by a man who wears a kind of handkerchief, which only covers half his head, his arms naked to the elbow like a cook, his coat open, standing by a page who has a little hat with a feather in it, and is dressed in the Venetian fashion. We may judge whether this picture, the work of an admirable painter, is adapted to time and place."

Mr. Strutt has detected some singular improprieties of our Saxon painters. He thus writes: "They were far from having the least idea of any thing more ancient than the manners and customs of their own particular times. They put our Saviour, Noah, Abraham, and King Edgar, 'all in the same habit; and in some MSS., in the reign of Henry VI., are exhibited the figures of Meleager, Hercules, Jason, &c. in the full dress of the great lords of that prince's court.

J. P. JUN.

MISCELLANIES.

CURIOUS MODE OF FISHING.

THE fishers on the north side of the lake of Scodra, catch a kind of fish called Scoranza, in the following manner:-At a certain season of the year, the place is visited by vast flocks of a particular species of crow, which is regarded as sacred. The inhabitants then place their nets in the rivers and lakes; the Greek Priests, or the Turkish Imans, come to give their benediction to the work; and while this is doing, the crows remain silent and attentive spectators on the trees in the neighbourhood. A quantity of corn, previously blessed by the priest, is then thrown into the water, and instantly attracts the fish in multitudes to the surface. At this instant the crows dart down upon them with fearful cries; and the fish, terrified by the noise, rush into the nets in my riads, and become the prey of the fishermen. A part of the capture is regularly allotted to the crows and the priests, as a reward for their services, and this secures the punctual return of both at the proper time.

NEGRO IRISHMEN IN THE WEST

INDIES.

MONTSERRAT had Irish colonists for its early settlers, and the negroes to this day have the Connaught brogue curiously and ludicrously engrafted on the African jargon. It is said that a Connaught man, on arriving at Montserrat, was, to his astonishment, hailed in vernacular Irish by a negro from one of the first boats that came alongside "Thun der and turf," exclaimed Pat," how .، Three long have you been here?": months," answered Quashy. months! and so black already!! Hanum 'a jool," says Pat, thinking Quashy a cidevant countryman," I ll not stay among ye;" and in a few hours the Connaught man was on his return, with a white skin, to his emerald isle.

"Three

Montgomery Martin's History of the British Colonies.

ANTS IN GRENADA.

THEIR numbers (says Mr. Montgomery Martin) were so immense, as to cover the roads for the space of several miles; and so crowded in many places, that the prints of the horses' feet were distinctly heard amongst them, till filled by the surrounding multitudes. They made bridges across large and rapid rivers with the dead bodies of their comrades. Every kind of cold victuals, all species of vermin, particularly rats, and even the sores of the negroes, were exposed to their attack. A premium of 20,000. from the public treasury was offered to the discoverer of any effectual method of destroying them, and the principal means were poison and fire. By mixing arsenic and corrosive sublimate with animal substances, myriads were destroyed; and the slightest tasting of the poison rendered them so outrageous as to devour one another. Lines of red-hot charcoal were laid in their way, to which they crowded in such numbers as to extinguish it with their bodies; and holes full of fire were dug in the cane grounds, which were soon extinguished by heaps of dead. But while the nests remained undisturbed, new progenies appeared as numerous as ever, and the only effectual check which they received was from the destructive hurricane, which, by tearing up altogether, or so loosening the roots of the plants where they nestled, as to admit the rain, almost extirpated the whole

race.

THE town of Soleure is situated amongst the mountains of Jura, and along the fertile and romantic vale of Balstal. It is the capital of the canton which bears the same name, and is watered by the beautiful river Aar. The town is small, but neat, and surrounded by stone fortifications. It claims the honour of having been built originally by our great father Abraham; and its public repositories exhibit inscriptions and medals, that give it the highest title to antiquity. Hugo Von Bucheg was a venerable burgher and chief magistrate of the town of Soleure. He had long been regarded as father of the council, and the people placed their reliance upon him in every time of danger. His habits were plain and simple. He had amassed no wealth, for his services were given and not sold. One treasure he possessed, which he considered beyond all price, and that was his only child, Ellen. She had early lost her mother, and had spent her time almost as she pleased, in wandering about the suburbs of Soleure, gathering plants for her collections, and accumu

lating a stock of health, energy, and cheerfulness. It must not be supposed that this life of freedom was without system. It was consistent with Swiss habits and opinions. "My daughter," said the old Bucheg, "is studying the wisest book in the world-that of nature. And so thought Ellen; for, except a common school education, she had had few advantages; yet her mind had expanded beyond her years, and every object filled it with new thoughts and associations.

She was yet at a tender age, when her father received a most earnest letter from his only sister, who resided in the valley of Lauterbrunn, entreating him to spare his daughter to her for a few months, representing the solitude of her own situation, and the want she had of youthful and cheering society. The last plea he could not resist, and Ellen was, for the first time, separated from her father.

She found her aunt, who was a widow, sick and low spirited. It was a new situation for Ellen. Hitherto her life had demanded but few sacrifices; but now her duties began, and day and night she was seated by her bedside.