dhar as I was in the act of removing it, and, holding it fast, shook his head in a threatening way, as if, less superstitious and more cunning than the rest, he had already half detected

me.

"He's trying you"--the thought came to me with such suddenness and force as to produce the impression of a warning, actually whispered in my ear. He was trying me. He knew that if I were really mad, this attempt to thwart me would be of no avail; whereas, if I were merely dissembling, I should probably be frightened, or, at least, confused. Whether all that did really pass through his mind, God only knows; but, certainly, I made my sagacity his. I was careful to betray no astonishment, no alarm; but without agitation, stooping down, I took up the musket which the first man had left, very coolly and deliberately cocked it, very coolly and deliberately placed the muzzle to his chin-and pointed to the dhar. He instantly and eagerly jerked off his own dhar, and laid it at my feet. Then, leaving their lances, both twahed, when I told them, and went back to their party.

They had hardly left, when a remote noise of many feet and voices grew into a regular rush and an Irish yell. A party of wild bog-trotters of the 80th came down upon these Burmese, fired volleys right and left, and then charged them. That moment was to me the most dangerous in the whole affair, because these fellows would not recognize me-would not believe in me. They would not discover in time that I was one of their comrades who had got into such an infernal plight. At first I thought of hallooing to them; but in another moment I was hiding myself under the cover of the boat. I felt that if I but showed just one hair of my head, there would be fifty bullets through me in a flash. They would fire, of course, at any head emerging from that boat.

rahed and shouted to each other. As the last man disappeared I ran after him, dragged myself up the bank, and cried 66 Help, help, boys!" as loud as I could; some of them returned, thinking, perhaps, that one of the party was hurt. When the sergeant, who was behind the rest, saw me, he presented his bayonet close to my head. I was down then, and quite helpless. He asked me "who the hell" I was, and where I came from. They at first took me for a renegade, and all came crowding around me. But one recognized my navy-blue trowsers, and said: "Why, don't you see he is one of the ship's men;" and another, who, the day before, as we were steaming up the river, had come to me for some tobacco, said: "I know him-that's the doctor, that's the doctor of the ship. Good God! where did he come from?" Then they put me in a dhoolee, which had been brought with the party, and carried me some little distance, where I found myself among officers and personal friends. One circumstance will serve to show the state of my mind at this time: As I lay in the dhoolee, a Burman passed by, and, although he was a friend, the sight of him excited me so, that I struggled to take a musket from a soldier who was walking by the side of the dhoolee, to shoot the fellow with. My rage was still upon me. It was singular how it drove off even gratitude-the brought-to-bay feeling would not leave me yet.

I lay then on the porch of a bamboo house with my friends around me, and, after awhile, was sufficiently composed, under the influence of a powerful draught given me by one of the surgeons, to sleep a little. Towards dusk, the place being fairly taken, the Burmese routed, and the Peguans mingling with us joyfully, Captain Neblitt, of the steamer, determined to return to the ship and take me with him. We started down with the tide in two boats-I with the boatswain and eight men in one, and the captain, also with eight men, in the other.

I have an affectionate remembrance of that boatswain; his name was Haswell, or Haslett, or something beginning with H, and sounding so, and he was one of our best men-cool, very brave, and a first-rate gunner. That night, and in a strange scene, he told me that he was an American from Fall River, Mass.

he touched me quickly. The other men still slept. The sound grew louder and nearer. He whispered to me, "Burmese boat-don't move!" Then cautiously approaching each man, and putting his hand over his mouth, he roused him, and bade him take up his arms. The Burmese war crews have not oars like ours, but short paddles, with which they make two sharp, perpendicular strokes, followed by an interval of pause. They utter, in concert, a kind of yelp, to keep stroke together. Their war-boats are immensely long, sometimes holding two hundred men, who sit in close single files along the sides of the alligator-like craft. Although the motion of their paddles is very quick, they all strike the water at the same instant by help of this dismal monotone. So do the Hindoo palkheebearers keep step to a similar song.

Our men recognized the sound, and gathered their arms together as noiselessly as possible. Some drew their cutlasses and laid them on the seats beside them; some took off their jackets, loosened their straps, and examined their pistols. The question with us

My countrymen in the Company's service were under the impression, that if their nativity became known, they would not get their fair share of prize-money. And so when the men were gathered in knots on the forecastle-deck and around the forward gun, talking of Yankees, these would often chime in against themselves. That the boatswain was a good man is shown by his having been intrusted with the command of this boat, to take her through an enemy's country at night. When we started, night was falling rapidly, and waiting for orders from the captain, who was detained, we lost the best part of the tide. All the men were armed except me; I was still without hat, or shoes, or shirt; or arms. We pulled along with perfect confidence until it was quite dark. There was no moon that night. We knew that the Burmese were scattered, and were not likely to attack us; but as the darkness deepened, there came over us the gloom of mystery, and an indefinite apprehension. The men fell into profound silence, but pulled steadily and "with a will," so as to make the most of the tide.

At last the ebb began to slack, and before we had accomplished one-third of the distance to the ship, it had turned and set flood so hard that we could make no head against it, and were compelled to anchor. Then the boatswain told his men to lie on their arms and sleep while he kept watch. He lent me his boat-cloak and bade me sleep also; but I could not. As often as I fell into a doze I lived the whole horror over again. For a time Haswell sat upright and silent, occasionally laying his hand on me warningly, as if to say, "I hear something." After awhile he relaxed his vigilance in a degree, and leaned over to talk with me in a whisper. It was then that he first told me he was an American, and spoke of Shields, our comrade, who was killed. I could feel that tears were in his eyes. He said, that the three of them (including another who was on the sick list and had been left behind) had always kept an eye on me; for I was then a somewhat reckless person. He told me, with a certain rough delicacy, that Shields had often watched me "to see that I did not fall into trouble."

But Haswell was still the weathereared sailor, and as he whispered he listened all the while. Presently we heard again that same low baying;

then was, would the Burmese come down on our side of the stream, or on the other. In other words, were they about to run into us, or to pass on the other side, in the dark, without perceiving us? There were only eight of us, and, probably, not less than eighty of them but then we were waiting for them, while they would not see us till they felt us. We were well armed and active, and they would surely believe they had fallen into a swarm. The tide was against them; but Burmese boats do not stay for that; they are constructed with an expert eye to those racing rivers. Being so long and sharp, and the paddles dipping perpendicularly, they can be run close under the bank, in slack water, or a counter current. So the tide, which compelled us to anchor, presented no material obstacle to our enemies. Thus, we lay in the darkness-every man with both hands on his weapons, ready to use them the next moment. There were no more than the proper complement of arms, but the boatswain drew one of his own pistols from his belt, and laid it on my knee.

The war-boat passed by on the other side (the stream was very narrow there), without their discovering us. I won't

enlarge upon the scene. Here was our little party, hidden under the jungly bank, waiting for an accident-heads or tails, right or left to decide whether or not we should suddenly come into deadly conflict with ten times our number of savages, in pitchy darkness; and there were the invisible devils, perfectly unconscious of our proximity, iterating their monotonous war-noteso near, that we could almost have touched them with our oars. When the tide turned again, the captain overtook us; they had passed him in the

same way.

The little English boy was found, by Tarleton or Neblitt, on the bank, very near where I had landed, wandering about stark naked, and entirely crazy, with little lance wounds, mere scratches, in the fleshy parts of his arms and legs. When I plunged into the stream, he paused to observe what would happen. When he saw how they fired at me, he was afraid to follow, and went down into the hold of the boat, where he hid himself among some hospital traps. On taking possession of the boat, the Burmese rummaged it thoroughly, in search of booty, and found the boy. They dragged him out from among the dhoolies, and took him on deck, where they played with him, and tumbled him about, felt of his limbs, wondered at his skin, laughed over his little clothes, and made game of him generally. With their dhars, they cut off locks of his hair. Then they stood him up against a beam, to try his courage, and threw darts at him-slender, armed reeds, between arrows and lances; with these they grazed

the skin of his arms and legs. At last, the boy became quite maddened with fear, and, suddenly breaking through the very centre of the party, jumped into the river. Swimming down the stream with the tide, he finally landed where the captain found him. He was taken down to the frigate, where he eventually recovered.

Poor Shields! A ball had struck the top of his left shoulder, just inside the collar-bone, and severed a main artery. Although, when we fled, we left his body in the boat, which the Burmese took possession of immediately-and although so high a price was set on British heads, his was spared, nor had the slightest insult, apparently, been offered to his corpse. In the search for plunder, hurried in momentary fear of our return, or of a surprise from some other quarter, they had forgotten their human prize, or feared to seize it. Indeed, their hot haste was evident in the fact that they had even left the flags at the sterns of the boats, although they had made away with the camp-boxes of the officers-among the rest, with one, containing three hundred rupees,brought up by a young ensign, no less verdant than amorous, who had heard of the charms of the maidens of Pegu.

Poor Shields! he sleeps in his loneliness under the shadow of the ShwayMadoo, and the young Yankee sailor's grave was watered by tears as true as ever eyes let fall. In Boston I have sought in vain for his mother. His share of prize-money awaits her order, in the office of the Superintendent of Marine, at Calcutta.

I.

LA

ATE one Saturday afternoon, in a certain December, I sat by a good sea-coal fire, in my office, trying to muster courage enough for an encounter with the cold winds and driving storm outside. Half ashamed to confess my cowardice to myself, I had done every unnecessary thing I could think of to kill time, till, at last, I was reduced to the necessity of counting over the contents of my purse. This, however, was but a brief resource. 66 A short horse," as the proverb hath it, "is soon curried." The only coin worth lingering on was a bright, new halfeagle, given me that morning by some chance customer, as my recompense for "doing a deed."

Limited as my practice and my fees had always been, half-eagles were not entirely a novelty to me; and yet, from the prolonged attention with which, in my procrastinating frame of mind, I regarded it, a looker-in might have supposed I was studying some rare antique, instead of a very ordinary specimen of Uncle Sam's daily spending-money. I examined it chronologically, with reference to the date, and, geographically, in respect to the mark of the mint whence it issued. I compared the eagle, on the one side, with my remembrance of such ornithological specimens as I had seen in traveling museums, and of the effigy then solemnly believed to be of solid gold-which, in my boyish days, kept watch and ward over Tommy Townsend's coffee-house. I scrutinized the head of liberty with the eye of a physiognomist; and in attempting, with a sharp-pointed pen-knife, to give the hybrid profile a more feminine

A knock at the door checked the half-uttered malediction, and was only repeated when I cried, "Come in." Had spiritual rappings been invented then, I might have thought that Satan, his patience exhausted by this new development of wickedness, was about to foreclose the mortgage he is popularly supposed to hold on every member of our profession; as it was, I only rose and opened the door. The ruddy firelight streamed out into the dark entry, and fell upon a slight figure that seemed almost the embodiment of its coldness and gloom. The figure, however, was too familiar to me to inspire any supernatural fears, being that of a young woman who earned a scant livelihood by copying for lawyers. Why need I describe her? An employment requiring easy penmanship, and some acquaintance with commas and periods, if not with the more essential parts of composition, falls almost, as a matter of course, to those who, at some period, have had greater advantages-to those who, in that common but more touching phrase, "have known better days." The result is easily guessed. It might be told in many a tale of patient suffering and labor; of bright eyes dimmed with late watching; of red cheeks blanched to the hue of the paper before them; of young hopes withered and shrunk, till they are as lifeless and void of meaning, to the weary heart, as the dry legal phrases of the copy to the tired hand that transcribes them!

And while I had been lingering idly