"Nor do I think he wishes it, if he can be clear of us with safety to himself," replied Ingram.

Two days more passed away, and then Ingram told me that we were a few miles from the town, and should soon be at an anchor.

"Go softly," replied I, " and tell me what is going on."

He went up the ladder, but soon came down again, saying, “We are locked in, sir."

I was very much annoyed at this, but it could not be helped-our only remedy was patience-but I must confess that I was in a state of great anxiety. We heard the anchor let go, and boats came on board, after which all was silent for the night. The next morning we heard them open the hatches, and the slaves ordered upon deck. The day was passed in landing them. I was ravenously hungry, and asked Ingram whether they intended to starve us. He went up the ladder to call for victuals, when he found on the upper step of the ladder a large vessel full of water and some cooked provisions, which had probably been put there during the night. There was enough to last two or three days. The next day passed and no one came near us, and I had some thoughts of dropping out of the stern ports and attempting to swim on shore; but Ingram, who had put his head out of them as far as he could, told me that we must be at some distance from the shore, and that there were several sharks playing round the stern, as is always the case with vessels laden with slaves.

The next morning, however, put an end to our suspense, for the companion was unlocked, and Olivarez, accompanied by four Portuguese, came down into the cabin. He spoke to them in Portuguese, and they advanced, and seizing Ingram and me by the collar, led us up the ladder. I would have expostulated, but of course could not make myself understood. Olivarez, however, said,

"Resistance is useless, Mr. Musgrave; all you have to do is to go quietly with these men. As soon as the schooner has sailed, you will be released."

"Well,” replied I, "it may be so, Olivarez; but mark my words, you will repent this, and I shall see you on a gibbet.”

"I trust the wood is not yet out of the ground," replied he; "but I cannot waste any more words with you."

"He then spoke to the Portuguese, who appeared to be government officers of some kind, and they led us to the gangway; we went into the boat, and they pulled to the shore.

"Were can they be taking us, Ingram?" said I.

"Heaven knows, sir, but we shall find out."

The

I attempted to speak to the officers, but they cried " Silentio," which word I fully understood to mean "silence," and finding that I could not induce them to hear me, I said no more. We landed at a jetty, and were then led through the streets to a large square. On one side of it was a heavy building, to which they directed their steps. door was opened for us, and we were led in. A paper was produced by our conductors, and was apparently copied into a book, after which they went away, leaving us with the people who had received us, and who, by their appearance, I knew to be gaolers.

"Of what crime am I accused?" inquired I.

No reply was given, but two of the subordinates took us away, un

locked a massive door, and thrust us into a large court-yard, full of men

of

every colour.

“Well,” said I, as the door closed upon us, events; but the question now is, shall we be had stated ?"

we are in gaol at all released as Olivarez

"It is hard to say," replied Ingram. "The question is, what gaol is this? Could we find any one who could speak English, we might find

out."

Several of those around us had come towards us to examine us, and then left us, when, as we were conversing, a negro came up, and hearing what we said, addressed us in English.

"Massa want one to speak English-I speak English-some long while on board English vessel."

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Well, then, my good fellow," said I, can you tell us what this gaol is, and what prisoners are confined here for?"

"Yes, massa, every body know that, suppose he live at Rio. This gaol for people that go dig diamonds."

"How do you mean?"

"Mean! massa-people sent here to work in diamond mines all life long till they die. Keep 'em here till hab plenty to send up all at one time. Then guard take them up the country, and they go dig and wash for diamond. Suppose you find very big diamond, you go Suppose not, den you die there."

"Merciful Heavens !" cried I to slaves to the mines."

free.

Ingram, "then we are condemned as

"Well, it's better than working

"Yes,” replied Ingram with a sigh. in the quicksilver mines. At all events, we shall have fresh air.” "Fresh air without liberty," cried I, clasping my hands.

"Come, sir, courage, we do not yet know our fate. Perhaps we may, as Olivarez said, be allowed to go free after the schooner sails."

I shook my head, for I was convinced otherwise.

THE CALM.

BY J. E. CARPENTER.

ALL day! all night! again all day,
Upon the wave our vessel lay;
Becalm'd upon the silent deep,
The lazy hull seem'd hush'd in sleep;
The gray shark bared his slimy side,
We shudder'd as we saw him glide,
Around our prow and on our lee,
All noiseless in that glassy sea.

And we pray'd for the wind, for its wild alarm,
Less terrible was than that death-like calm.

Upon the deep no wind, no wave
To lift us in our living grave,
For such our vessel seem'd to be
Upon that weary, desert sea;

We marked the helmsman's cheek grow pale,
What sound was that?-what stirs ?-a sail!
The breeze-the breeze-we hear them now,
The ripples on our vessel's prow.

Oh! bless'd is the wind, for its wild alarm,
Less terrible seems than that death-like calm.

"Ce qu'on apprend dès le berceau, dure jusques au tombeau."-Old Pro

VERB.

CHAP. I.

"I do not see why I should, and what is more, I will not ;" said Jack Hatton, as he flung a book, which he had been endeavouring to read, from one side of his room to the other.

"Will not do what?" asked his friend, Percy Bolton, looking up at him, and holding in suspense a pack of cards on which he had been practising some ingenious manœuvres.

"Risk being plucked, merely for the sake of having A. B. tacked to my name in the Cambridge Calendar. How I do hate Euclid! and, moreover, of what possible service to me will a degree be?"

"Cela depend," answered his friend, resuming his manœuvres with the cards. "How do you mean to play the great game of life?—Tell me that, and I will resolve your problem. There are not many moves on the cards that I am unacquainted with, as you know."

"If you mean to ask me what profession I intend to follow, I answer you at once-none. I have been used to a quiet country life from my cradle; and as I am my own master, and have the means for pursuing it to my grave, I do not see why I should not do so."

"What may be the amount of those means?" asked Percy.

"I have three hundred a year, clear of all incumbrances; a snug cottage, and as neat a little farm as is to be found in Wiltshire, or any other county," said Jack.

Percy smiled, as he shook his head and declared the amount to be a pretty little stake to begin with; but far too inconsiderable to justify him in giving up the game upon it.

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"Your habits and mine are so essentially different, that you cannot understand my position," said Jack Hatton; one hundred pounds in hands would go further than a thousand in yours."

my

"I should not be inclined to agree with you, did I not detest arguing a point; but as I have a strong belief in fate or destiny, whichever you please to term it, I will settle the question for you by an appeal to these fortune-tellers," said Percy Bolton, as he shuffled the pack and placed it before his friend. "Now cut these cards. If a red one turns up, you have my permission to cut college, and bury yourself in the county of Wilts, and be as dull therein as Old Sarum itself.”

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Jack Hatton lifted a card and showed it. Rouge gagne," said Percy Bolton; and, in the course of the day, the young man, who had set his fortune on the cut, took his name off the books of his college, his leave of his tutor and friends, and his place on the box of the mail-coach.

Percy Bolton went to the inn with him to see him off, and, in spite of his professed reliance on fate or destiny, confessed to himself that he regarded his friend in the light of a fool, who was throwing away a good chance in the great game of life.

Jack Hatton-for, like most good-natured men, he had always been called by his nickname-was just twenty-two when he quitted Cambridge. He was a fair scholar, as far as classic lore was concerned, but he detested mathematics, and, from having been educated at a public school, where the preliminary step, arithmetic, was despised as necessary for commercial pursuits only, believed himself to be incapable of conquering the difficulties of the ars mathematica. That he tried to do it, is true, and, had he been compelled to persevere in the trial, he might have succeeded; but being possessed of that dangerous drawback to perseverance, a small independency, as we have seen, he threw away his books, and left college, without having accomplished the object for which he had entered the attainment of a degree.

He had formed a friendship with Percy Bolton at the school to which they had been admitted on the same day; and although their dispositions and pursuits were essentially incompatible, their intimacy continued when they became brother collegians. Hatton was a great rower, and very fond of angling, in all its branches; consequently he was always to be found on the river or the river's brink. Bolton looked upon rowing as a species of galley-slavery, and entertained much the same opinion of a stick-string-and-worm man, as the great lexicographer is reputed to have done. Jack, moreover, painted a little and loved poetry; both of which pursuits, Percy thought proofs of effeminacy, and a sad waste of that time which ought to be devoted to riding after a strong smelling animal, called a fox, driving tandem, shuffling "the books," and rattling the dice-box, and "the bones."

Although their pursuits were so essentially different, and they had many an argument as to which were the most pleasant and proper, still they never quarrelled on the subject, but rubbed on together as happily and as cozily-to use their own school term-as we often see gentlemen and ladies contrive to do who have married each other, though not fac similes, either in temper or inclination. When, then, Hatton left Cambridge so suddenly and unexpectedly, Bolton felt that he had parted with a valuable and loved companion, and resolved not to lose sight of him, but resume his intimacy with him so soon as he should have accomplished his career at the university. In this intention he was, at that time, sincere, and several letters passed between them; but upon quitting Cambridge, Bolton started for a tour on the continent, and the correspondence was suddenly broken off on his part; and, by the allurements of Paris and the other continental cities which he visited, the image of the friend of his youth was obliterated.

We must just pause to see the sort of life that Jack Hatton led at his little farm in Wilts for some years after he quitted Cambridge, which afforded as great a contrast to the life led by his former companion as can well be conceived.

The Dale Farm, as its name will suggest, was seated in one of those deep and difficult-to-be-discovered dips which intersect the lofty, wild, sheep-covered downs of the West of England. The cottage stood in the midst of a village, which boasted of some half-a-dozen small farm buildings and residences, a few labourers' huts, the shop, a church and parsonage, and, of course, a public-house, honoured with the name of an inn; and down from the Combe, or hollow space between two high hills, above it flowed a bright clear stream, which forced its bubbling, boiling, tortuous

way, through green banks covered here and there with stunted thornbushes, pollard willows, and straggling alders, and turned several miniature mill-wheels in its course, before it entered the meadows of the Dale Farm, and formed, what might be called a respectable trout-stream.

We have before alluded to Hatton's fondness for angling, and, as he had this well-stocked stream to himself-by consent of the villagers, who hated fishing, although they did not hate the fish when presented to them by the fisherman-it is not to be wondered at, that he passed much of his time on its banks. Trout-fishing, however, does not last all the year round, so Jack, although he was not much of a shot, nor much of a Nimrod, took out a licence to kill partridges, and hunted with a neighbouring pack of beagles. Thus, with his in-door pursuits and a round of visits limited to a circuit of some fifteen miles, and a due reciprocation of them at his own hospitable but frugal table, he contrived to make out his time in a way highly satisfactory to himself.

a

The Dale Farm did not own a mistress. Jack was a bachelor, and by choice. He could have married had he pleased; for more than one lady had looked kindly on him. He thought, however, that his income was, like the goose, of which the reader may have heard, "sufficient for one, but not enough for two." Moreover, he was waited upon by an aged couple who had lived with him and his parents for the greater portion of their lives, and although they suited him very well, he thought that if lady took upon herself the management of his affairs, as Mistress Hatton, she might wish to pension them off, and replace them by a pair of younger and smarter domestics. It is possible that he might have had a vision, and dreamed of receiving hints about the rheumatic tendency of fly-fishing, the danger of guns bursting, or of a fall from his horse, but, especially, of the unpleasant odour arising from painting in oils-certain it is, however, that he eschewed matrimony, and was regarded as a confirmed bachelor.

CHAP. II.

"HERE's a 'pistle wi' a dab o' black wax on un, and framed in black like an old pictur! Wonder who'ts from!" said Samuel Digby, the groom, gardener, and garçon of the Dale Farm, as he turned and twisted about a letter which bore evident marks of being the messenger of bad tidings,

"And what is't to thee who'ts from, Mister Curious?" asked his wife, snatching it out of his hand, and examining it as well as she could. "Give it to me," said Jack Hatton-for this dialogue between his servants took place in his parlour-" and rely upon it, Mary, if its contents at all concern you or your husband, you shall know them."

"There, do go along, Mister Inquisitive; the pony wants his oats nearly as bad as you wants to know who ter letter's from," said Mary, giving Master Digby a push towards the door, for which he looked pitchforks at her, but obeyed her slowly and reluctantly.

Mrs. Digby, having thus got rid of her husband, pretended to be very busy in placing the breakfast things on the tray previously to their removal, but although "the_things" consisted merely of one cup and saucer, one plate, and one of every other necessary, the job occupied her until her master had finished reading the letter which had excited her curiosity.