The fight was over. The ship which had relieved them was the convoy under whom they had started. Her accomplished officers and gallant crew administered every comfort to the wounded, performed every office for the dead, and then proceeded in pursuit of the late baffled enemy.

When Tyler was restored to consciousness, he was relieved the necessity of inquiring for Dorcas, by the sight of her bending over him. Her joy seemed like the joy of the other world. No violent manifestations broke from her-what she felt, she felt in silence. The spirit of joy is like the spirit of grief. Its feebler sensations may be communicated to our fellows; light occasions may make us loud in our expressions; but as the sense increases upon us, it absorbs our words-it concentrates, for the time, every thought, feeling, passion and emotion of the soul into one grand point, and our tongues are chained as by a spell. The babbling rivulet, that winds its shallow tide through a rocky channel, has a laugh and a sound for every beholder; but when the stream swells to a river, it borrows a dig. nity from its dilation, and rolls on, broad and deep, but in silence. It is so with grief, and so it is with joy. The current of gladness that ripples over every happy heart, has a double office to perform-it must not only gladden the one who feels it, but those with whom that one is brought in contact. But when the current is swelled to a spring-tide, it is locked up within the recesses of the single heart, and appeals not to the sympathies of others, save by the eloquence of tears.

Between this heavenly, elevated joy, and that displayed by the other passengers, the difference was as great as that between the holy of holies and the vestibule of the temple. Here was the nabob, rejoicing that he still remained alive to be able to roll on in luxury; here the trafficker, chuckling that his gains still enriched his own coffers. An epitome of the whole world was to be found within the sides of that noble vessel, and each had his own selfish reasons for rejoicing in the general good. One of the noisiest of them all was an individual, who was well content to share the glory, though he had kept himself aloof from the danger of the deed. He was one of your fat, bustling characters, who make up in sound what they want in sense,

"You see, gentlemen," said he, "I never in my life could shoot straight without a rest, and it seemed specially ordered by Providence that there was one convenient to the very place where I had taken my station. A high coil of rope seemed to have been placed there just on purpose for me, and the way I popped over them devils, when I got behind it, was a rarity. You tee I knew it wouldn't do no good for me to let them know I was there, because in that case they might just have put me out of the way and seized on the place themselves. So I just kept my eyes pretty wide open, and every time I saw them all looking some other way, I would let fly at 'em and then dodge behind again. I thought moreover that I could in this way keep a good look out to see if any of you were in danger, and if I saw any of you likely to be overpowered, I could send a quiet ball and settle the matter. But you see when the pirates got to moving over that way, I knew it would be nothing short of madness to keep the position; so I slipped along, Providence only knows how, behind the gang-way house, where I thought I could act as a corpse-de-reserve, in case of your being driven back so far. When I seen that young lady was there too, I felt a double thankfulness, for her own and her dead father's sake, who was my particular friend, and so 1 tried to get her to slip down along side of me out of the way. But she would stand up, and took no notice of me except once, when she asked me to lend her my sword, and she would go and take my place among the men. This looked like an insinuation, but I said noth. ing, and only longed for an opportunity to defend her. And gentlemen, it came! thank heaven, it came! For when you were falling back upon me, just as I put my sword between my teeth, and took my pistol in one hand and gun in the other, to run out to your assistance, you know we heard the cry of 'a sail!'-and just as that fellow rushed out to snatch the young lady, I fired my pistol and gun at him both at once, and he fell dead, but not till he had given that young man a dig on the head to pay him for his rashness. Where was the use of his running out in that way at the man, when he saw I had finished him? I don't suppose he wanted to deprive me of the honor of killing him, but”—and here the little big man folded his arms across his breast, raised his eye-brows, and accompanied each word with an oracular nod of the head-"but-it-looked like it. But I won't harbor malice. I look upon this act, gentlemen, as the crowning act of my life, not only worth living, but dying for; and I here repeat solemnly that I would this moment give my life to have it in my power to perform such another, or my name's not Sam Blaze."

During this declamatory burst, sundry sly winks had been passing around the audience; but when the hero had coolly and deliberately appropriated to himself the VOL. V.-7

"You say," said the stranger, a short, stumpy man, whose nose was a perfect note of interrogation, "you say you knew the father of that young lady; perhaps you can give me some account of herself. It's not often one sees so pretty a creature and so young know so much about grief as she seems to. Why, she's rigged out in black, as if she had stripped a half a dozen hearses to provide herself with mourning."

"Well she may," said the little, big man, glad to find another vent for his self-importance; "well she may; for such fathers and mothers as she lost don't die every day-but, sir, it's because they don't live, sir. If the world was only made up of such people, I'd never ask to go to heaven, sir, because I'd think I was in heaven a'ready. Intimately acquainted with both of them, sir, and a better man I never saw, and his wife, sir, seemed an angel sent direct from heaven to keep him company, sir. Because, sir, it would have been just as unnatural, sir, and the Lord knew it, sir, for such a good man to intermarry with the children of this world, as it was for the Israelites to intermarry with the heathen nations around them."

"And how did they get to India ?"

"The old story, sir; married for love and found it wouldn't do to live on; so they took ship for where they wouldn't have the rich old folks to be all the time casting it up at them, and saying, 'We told you so.' And depend upon it, sir, the opposition of parents has been the means of making more happy marriages, than all other causes put together. You see, sir, a young man courts a lady, and her parents don't like him. They think him a sorry, no-account sort of chap, and don't want their daughter to have any thing to do with him. May be he is, sir; but he's got human nature enough not to like to have it cast up to him, and so he runs away with the daughter, and not only that, but makes a first-rate husband, just purely to spite the old ones. I believe in doing things out of spite, sir; and there are some people, sir, that won't be influenced in any other way. They are like the Irishman's pig, sir; he could be driven to Cork very well, if you'd only turn his head towards Kilkenny."

Why, sir, he's the one that was sent over to take charge of her. His servant tells me that he is a fatherless young man of handsome fortune, who with his mother, is residing with a widowed aunt of his in the north of England. This young lady is to receive an annuity from her grandfather's executors, and the aunt, who belongs to the family, was bequeathed a legacy on condition of receiving her under her roof. The servant tells me that the young man's mother is one of your easy, timid, good-hearted sort of women, but that his aunt is a real devil. The gentleman seems to be quite a nice young man, and I liked him very well, till he rushed forward in that cowardly way, and tried to deprive me of the honor of killing that pirate."

They were interrupted by a loud laugh from another part of the vessel, and a call for Mr. Blaze. This personage went forward to comply with the summons, while the queer-nosed man, having taken out his notebook, sat down to add his newly acquired information to its contents. His informer was none other than the former butler of the young lady's grandfather. He had been allured by the prospect of bettering his condition, to make an apparently disinterested offer of his services to his young master, and accompanied him to India. In that country, where every body must make money, he had contrived, in the service of his master, to amass something considerable, and was now on his return to England. He found the party who had called him, engaged in inspecting a couple of shot-holes in the back of the gang way house, behind which he had ensconced himself, during the engagement.

"We were making up a subscription," said the most quizzical looking one of the group, "to buy that gun and pistol of yours, with which you killed the pirate. They must be natural curiosities-something like the

"Bless your soul, no, sir! Their families, sir, were tip-top; but some old quarrel had been kept up between them, ever since the old rebellion, and they'd no more have agreed to intermarry, than they would to have jumped into Mount Vesuvius! And when they found these young folks had run away together, they made no more ado about cutting them off with a halter apiece, than they would about snatching a bone from a dog's mouth. But it made no great odds. They went to India, sir, and made something right pretty, sir; they lost it all, and what's worse, themselves too. That horrid climate, sir; if it was a man, how many murders it would have to answer for!"

"And this young lady?"

but

stack. Look here; your two bullets went through this plank, and when they got to the mouth of the gangway, turned short round the corner, picked out the fel low that was jumping overboard with the young lady, and knocked him in the head. It's a God's mercy that they didn't complete the circle, and come on round where they started from and kill yourself. But I suppose the pirate's head, was so hard that when they had gone through it they had to stop, and couldn't go any farther."

Blaze was a man in full possession of some of the happiest facilities of our nature. Among these was a settled, well-regulated impudence, that was perfectly indomitable. On the present occasion he merely glanced around an expression of complete wonderment, and

from the divulgement of her expectations, and been content to play her card in silence. She had never even dreamed of disappointment, but calculated as confidently on the issue as if the game had already ended in her favor. But now, when the revelations of a moment had dashed the cup from her lips, she felt all the workings of the fiend. She loved her daughter-as the tigress loves her young; and she felt chafed and revengeful, that her daughter had been slighted. She was a woman who plumed herself greatly on that low kind of ingenious shrewdness, which the fox displays in its doub. lings, and she felt a something stronger than chagrin, a malicious spitefulness, that for once, her shrewdness had failed her. But she was not one to bear disappointment with folded hands. She vowed that if Tyler would not marry Martha, he should not marry Martha's rival, and rejoiced that Dorcas was to be under her own roof, and therefore the more exposed to her designs. There was one circumstance that operated greatly in her favor. Mrs. Ethelwaite, Tyler's mother, was a weak woman and completely under her control. Her violent character was a rod of iron over the yielding disposition of her sister-in-law; and a certain terrible secret in regard to the latter was in her possession, and she used it as a whip of scorpions.

"You are my own husband's sister, Mrs. Ethelwaite," she would say, when she had a difficult point to carry, "you are my own husband's sister, but were you ten times his sister, you should not trifle with and triumph over me. I have no malice towards you, Mrs. Ethelwaite, but if I was to mention a Mr. Somebody's name in a particular way, I could, and you know it, put you in a condition that nobody would hire you to scrub their kitchen. I don't say I'll do it, but I do say I can't see the use of so much obstinacy when I only ask a small favor of you." While she would be going on in this way, poor Mrs. Ethelwaite would sit, pale as a corpse, and trembling like a leaf, and such was the effect upon her, that she would have been willing to sign her soul over to eternal perdition in the next world, if she only could have avoided infamy in this.

On the night when the travellers were expected, the three inmates of Bellevue were seated around the parlor fire. Mrs. Ethelwaite was running to the window every few moments to listen for the sound of the carriage; Martha, was biting the nails of one hand and thrumming the centre-table with the fingers of the other, while Mrs. Harris, was gazing moodily on the fire, and making a final disposition of her plans before entering on their execution.

"I do wish, Mrs. Ethelwaite," said she, breaking the silence, "you wouldn't keep flying about the room They'll be here not a bit the sooner for it, and so much fuss is enough to shatter one's nerves to pieces."

so.

"Well, sister," said Mrs. Ethelwaite, her eyes filling with tears, "I beg your pardon. Indeed I did not mean to disturb you. And now to punish myself, I won't stir from my chair again till he comes."

"Don't make a fool of yourself, and go to crying about it. I declare you are the strangest woman I ever saw. A body can't speak to you but you must make a baby of yourself."

"Well, sister," said she, forcing a smile, " don't scold me, and I'll sit just as still as I possibly can, and do

whatever you wish me to do; only let us all meet Tyler with a smile on our faces."

"Why, as to that, I love the boy, just as much as you do, and as much as I could if he was my own, but I am not going to make a fool of myself for him, or for any body else. I will do my part towards meeting him with a smile, but I doubt much whether you will do yours, unless you get a little of the tombstone out of your face, before he makes his appearance."

"I shall not have much time to do it in, then, for here he comes now," said she, running out of the room, as she heard the carriage coming up the avenue.

"Has he come?" drawled out Martha lazily, as if it was an effort to speak; "well, I believe I will go out and meet him too. And has Dorcas come, and may she sleep with me, mother?" And without waiting for an answer, she left the room in a slip-shod gait that she took to be the ne-plus of refinement.

"Fool!" muttered her mother with the deepest scorn, as she closed the door. "Sleep with you! yes! you'll hug her to your bosom, and find her a viper!" and with her hands clenched and the face of a fiend, she fairly stamped with rage. Mrs. Harris would have been wanting to her nature, had she lacked the common attribute of meanness-hypocrisy. She had a perfect control, an absolute despotism over her emotions, that would have made the fortune of a diplomatist. And she needed it all; for her plot was no child's whim, that a breath might alter. It was grounded deep as the foundations of her malice, and as she unfolded to herself its various windings, she became so elated with the certainty of success, that to meet the party with a cheerful smile, required not even an effort.

'Well, my boy," meeting them as they entered the door, "how do you do?-and you, my dear? I am glad to see you. We have been expecting you a long time, and you are right welcome to Bellevue. Let me assist you in taking off your things."

Who then thought that this affability, this cordiality, this excess of frankness, was but the playfulness of the painted snake, before it darts upon its victim!

The acute observer might have noticed a slight, momentary shade of vexation on the features of Mrs. Harris as she removed the bonnet of Dorcas, and saw revealed a face like those that tempted the angels. But she easily recovered herself, while she turned to give the article to a servant; and perhaps the very beauty of her victim gave her additional complacency from the thought how much more signal would be her triumph. She therefore conducted Miss Adelmar to the fire, and used all her fascinations to inspire her with affection and confidence.

"You find us in a rather retired situation, my dear. We have but few visiting acquaintances, so that for our enjoyments we are very much dependent on ourselves."

"You certainly have no lack of resources,” replied Dorcas, as she glanced at the centre-table, loaded with the choicest books.

"Why, yes; Martha is fond of reading, and I am always happy to encourage her taste. Some of them have just arrived from London, and I hope will please you. I sent for them on your account, fearing that you would, in such a lonely place, find little enough wherewith to amuse yourself."