THE PIRATE GEORGE.

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Off with these sombre swathes for a nun's habit! Cast them, and thy psalms, to chanting hags among the women. For thou wert born for the day. Thou wert sworn a servant of Aphrodite-ruling with a more absolute sceptre than chiselled crosier charming men of flesh and blood like a goddess; not beseeching saints or shadows like a mope. Come with me then at this most favourable moment. My men await - my ship backs her topsail (for thee) within hail-within the beckon of my finger is a boat. I have a casket of priceless jewels to hang about thy marble limbs. I will chain thee in precious chains of gold. I have money wherewith to array thee more superbly than a queen. I can put the lives of men in thy hands. And I can give thee power to place thy foot upon crowds of the people of such superstitious holds as this; with its paralytic priests, its jingling gimcracks, and its mad moping women. Listen to me! Seek not to fly, for it is hopeless. I shall never, I will never let thee go. But I fetter thee with kisses, with a passionately loving gripe. And see! See, Isabella! The blood-stained monster George is at thy feet. He who is dogged by the sabres of a thousand revengeful brothers, husbands, and lovers, gone wild in the thirst of vengeance for his imputed crimes-I am he whose name muttered here in this so-called holy place would cause all your bells to tingle to denounce him- flinging iron curses proclaiming him upon the Tropic air, and of themselves cracking-angel-struck-in the intensity of their horror at him! He whose foot burns in fancy through your thick stones as foot of the fiend -He whose barbarities could disrupt and undo, in fright at them, this whole hollow grand old building, and heap its ruins, solid like a pyramid, over his at last judgment-overtaken body-found out by the lightnings of the Eternal-HE prays on his knees for your love."

"Man, away-tempter, away! Wretch-madman! Would you lure me by the catalogue of your hideous sins ?" exclaimed Isabella, though she was almost sinking with fright as she struggled to disengage herself from the embraces of the Buccaneer. "Free me from thy

knowledge; which darkens me as veritably the Shadow of the Evil One! And oh my last hope! blessed Heaven assist me! Save me out of this instant, this terrible peril! For I am sinking in the net of this frightful boaster, this devil starred in his own iniquities. Even on the holily inscribed stones of Heaven's own sacred house, doth he kneel to ME, thy vowed priestess! soliciting me-me, A NUN, to perdition."

"I yield you not," cried George, as he set his lips close till the blood came, and he seized from his girdle the bag of silver which incommoded him in his deter

mined attempts to clasp the Nun over his shoulders and to bear her off. The canvas-bag broke in his hard gripe, and a heap of silver coins flew rattling out like a rain. Among the other silver-pieces there was ONE that illuminated for an instant, with an intolerable glow, the Gothic gallery. And it glanced sharp, and flew out of the Triforium window. As it swept past the dwarf pillars of the decorated arcade of which the Triforium-opening was composed, column and trefoil-heads were torn out as if by a Hand-a prodigious HAND that grasped them.

The sky darkened. The air turned thick blue— opaque-dun purple, as if in an eclipse. The stonework where the Pirate and the Nun now struggledthe one endeavouring to escape and the other to seize -became black.

There was a trembling under their feet, as if the entire solid stone structure, in the high tower of which they contended, was shaking apart-as if it were ejecting its metal-clamps in a startled shower of iron, and tumbling into ruin of itself. A strange, heavy, lumbering sound-preternatural and awful to a degreerolled beneath the sacred edifice, as if of the mighty waggon" of the underground Dis waiting for the ravished. There were sharp reiterated shrieks in the air. The steeples toppled, and there was a clatter and a clang, and a storm as it seemed of bells, as they were swayed bodily in the motion of the belfries. Gushes of white lightning hissed almost as it might be called, (for there was noise), in at the ranged, traceried, terrible windows now, of the holy house. And the batteries of the thunder kept up incessant discharges, while the whole city seemed to heave and to roll away, as upon the sea itself in billows dark and dreadful. Earthquake was struggling up to day in the centre of the whole island. The sea went and came like water in a cup. Ships, houses, trees, mighty stones, and all the confused parts of the late landscape (when still in its fright of expectation) were tossed and driven, as if to the sky, like sticks and straws. Such was the mighty earthquake of June, 1692, in this disrupted island.

At the first shake underneath of the great convent, the Pirate George-well knowing the fearful meaning of that motion-abandoned his grasp of the Nun. He staggered back, and lifted by the flags of the gallery which literally rose to his feet like the deck of his own ship as if vengefully rejecting him back again into his own sea-he tumbled headlong through the open window, grasping feebly at the broken ornaments of it. And the last that was seen of him was the keen flash of his knife (which he had again picked up)-bright for an instant upon the thick darkness without. The

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Buccaneer-captain flung past the opening and dropped headlong, like a stone, into that well of billows. The sea boiled up almost as it seemed for the express purpose of swallowing him alive, and meeting him.

But there was one to escape from the horrors of that scene from the torn walls, earthquake-battered, of her holy convent home. The crosses which spired and protested as they seemed to the lightnings were her rescue; were her protection. She fell indeed. But the enormous foliated metal crosses which sprang from every pinnacle and the minor groups of them of smaller size of polished steel which were set according to a quaint Catholic fashion, upon every "coigne of vantage," when the sacred building fell cracking like an egg-shell wholly in its hollow-these closed over in a defensive heap and struck in points starlike like cherub-swords above her; forming a sacred fence, and a sort of "angel castle" from which she-found fainted-was finally extracted (as from out a symbol-guarded crossed and recrossed tomb) when the great sea had gone down and when earthquake and horror had ceased. And this almost miraculously saved one was Isabella the Nun. Rescued even out of earthquake!

CHAPTER THE FIFTH,

MR. BOOTY AND THE SHIP'S CREW. TIME-1687.

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O circumstance connected with supernatural appearances has occasioned more altercation and controversy than the undermentioned in this story. The narrative certainly has an air of overstrained credulity; nevertheless, the affair is curious, and the coin

Chart produced in Court belonging to Captain Barnaby.

cidence very remarkable, especially as it was a salvo for Captain Barnaby. The former part of this narrative is transcribed from Captain Spinks's journal, or log-book, and the latter from the King's Bench Records for the time being. For both are extant and copied from faithfully.

"Tuesday, May the 12th. This day the wind S.S.W.,