longer under water, than did the avaricious old jumadar in search of the duplicate bangle. Ever and anon, after a lengthy dive, all draggled and dripping with wet, he rose to the surface above the outstretched necks and turbaned heads of his followers, puffing and blowing like a very grampus.

Had the decoits effectually rallied at this juncture, doubtless every one of those self-same fortune-hunters would have been knocked on the head and put hors de combat in detail. In fact, no band of reeling drunkards could have been more helpless and thoroughly disorganised.

Anticipating a surprise, I pulled a pistol from my belt; and shaking out the damp priming, reprimed afresh and kept anxious guard, while fitfully the tall rustling reeds of the jungle moaned, and the loud wailings of Hæsuen, in tremulous reiterations, came wafted on the breeze.

"Ho! toss here that scarf," I cried, pointing to one of the burqundazes, who had just fished up a broken dagger.

"Salaam, sahib," said the man, handing to me the blood-stained trophy.

There was, at this moment, a prolonged and deeper moan of anguish from the pulwar in the offing, that startled me not a little.

"Holla, there!" I cried; "hist, heard ye that?"

The whole band, alarmed at my abrupt call, springing up, stood bolt upright.

"What, sahib? where, sahib ?" all inquired, with flurried, anxious looks.

"Verily, ye all take it coolly," said I; "how can ye loiter here in calmness and apathy, and remain so deaf to the groans of your wounded comrade ? What! call ye yourselves true believers, and yet notwithstanding shall Hæsuen die unavenged? Behold that scarf in mine hand; ay, look well thereon; where is its owner now? Perdition seize the demons who shed that blood. I conjure ye to rise and take vengeance !"

""Tis well spoken; thy servants are in fault, and have erred!" said the jumadar, submissively pushing his men

overboard. "Blood for blood! blood for blood! the dogs of burnt fathers shall swallow fire!"

Having mustered in force on a narrow ridge of dry sand, some half arrow's flight or so from the edge of the jungle, there was held a general council of war, to determine our ulterior operations.

"The fox must first be unearthed," said I: "shall we beat up the jungle thoroughly? What say you all? Come, Kureem, speak freely."

"Hearken unto thy servant," quoth the peon. "Will not bruised snakes bite the heels of him who tramples upon them. Oh, sahib, refrain from entering the jungle."

"By the beard of the Prophet," cried the jumadar, "the peon hath spoken wisdom; the words are those of truth. May my face be blackened, if a man might not as easily pass through the poisonous terrai,* at the close of the rainy monsoon, as traverse that cursed jungle, wherein lurk those venomous snakes. Ullahee, shall not the whole nest of vipers be scorched to dust and ashes, and that right quickly?"

"Why, in what manner?" said I: "what wild words are these? Art thou a magician?"

"Hearken," said the jumadar; "your slave, accompanied by Abdoola, the chuokee-dar, will steal close up to the jungle, and first reconnoitre, and then for the tumashu."

"Good," I replied, nodding assent. Away, then," while my curiosity was strongly roused, for there was a sinister laughing devil in the jumadar's glittering eye, and a wild reckless abandonment in his whole demeanour and deportment, inspired, no doubt, by bang, opium, and ire, that boded no good to any one that might chafe or contradict him.

"Ho, Abdoola!" said the jumadar, "be of good cheer. Is thy matchlock charged?"

"Ay, jumadarjee," replied the chuokee-dar, doggedly.

"Hand me thy piece, then, and the match; and here, take my sword. Off with thy shoes-quick, quick !" said the jumadar, in a great flurry.

The burqundazes now began earnestly to whisper among themselves

concerning this mysterious reconnoisance, undertaken with so much secrecy and stealthiness.

"When my hand signals thus," cried the jumadar, wheeling sharply round, "then fire, and that quickly-there will be danger nigh. Come, Abdoola, come along; cower down-down, I say."

Abdoola and his chief, crawling cautiously forward through the shallows, slowly edged away towards an opening in the jungle, somewhat lower down the channel.

"See, see!" said one of the burqundazes, eagerly. On looking toward the quarter indicated, a low dark object, partially concealed by a brake of bamboos, and which had all along been mistaken for a charred stump of a tree, suddenly glided away. In a twinkling the pirate's scout had vanished.

"Stand fast-no skirmishing now!" I shouted, stepping between, and restraining some of the swordsmen, who made an attempt to dash forward at a tangent in pursuit.

Pacing to and fro, I waited impatiently for the jumadar's reappearance, and listened with breathless expectation; while some of the men, lying down on the shelf of sand, hearkened very earnestly. At length I obtained a hasty glance of the jumadar's tattered turban.

"Look, look, look! the jumadar is yonder!" cried all the burqundazes, one after the other, in a sort of running gruff accompaniment: whereupon our two scouts abruptly started out of the thicket, as if pursued by a whole swarm of angry bees; but the jumadar made no signal of danger.

"Ho, stand on your guard !— hold — reserve your fire!" I cried, prepared to advance, pistol in hand.

"Wah, wah! what flash was that? From whence cometh this crackling noise," quoth Kureem.

Anon spiral wreaths of white and yellow smoke curled over the top of the brushwood. The jumadar had fired the jungle.

"Aha, aha, aha!" said I ; "not well that the decoits should swallow fire?"

"God is great!" shouted the jumadar, exultingly, as he came plunging through the shallows," the hour of the muhajun's revenge is already come. By the head of the Prophet, Hosuen

This retrograde movement was effected without the slightest molestation; and re-embarking, we instantly weighed, and, taking cautious soundings, stood in over the flooded flats, in order to open a raking fire upon the pirates, should they make a sally. When within pistol-shot range of the stranded dingy, the pulwar bumped suddenly against a sunken shoal, jolting cruelly poor Hosuen, who had been lying, in a kind of swoon, athwart some timbers. Tortured by the sudden jerk, he essayed to rise, and shrieked aloud. Clammy drops, big as beads, bedewed his blanched forehead; his livid lips quivered, and cold tremors shook his herculean frame. Occasionally tossing his left arm vehemently to and fro, he gasped for breath, while his broad labouring chest heaved convulsively. His comrades, humouring his wish, slowly raised him up, and propped him so as to prevent his reeling backward. A faint smile, and then a transient ferocious expression of feature, like the scowl of defiance of the vanquished gladiator, flitted across the ghastly visage of the dying man, as his lustreless eye caught the bright ruddy glare of the burning isle, which now began to glow with the fiery redness of a volcano.

The withered reeds and rotten underwood had ignited like tinder; and the flames, fanned by the breeze, rolled along the ground in lengthy trails, like wildfire, with a booming, crackling noise. The giant jungle grass, dense as patches of ripened grain, wafted on the conflagration in the very eye of the wind; and the blazing bamboos, as the water and sap contained therein was converted into steam, ever and anon split asunder with thundering detonations. The bickering flames, spurning every opposing barrier, leaped quiveringly down the steep banks of the intersecting nullas, in fiery cataracts; and the heat and glow, fervid as the breath from a fiery crater, grew more and more stifling; while the moon, lately so bright and purely radiant, now eclipsed, loomed redly through the smoke's dusky haze.

"Wah, wah! a snake of fire, a snake of fire!" cried Kureem, eyeing in wrapt amazement a bright speckled serpent, whose bronze-hued scales, like burnished mail, gleamed luridly in the

zigzag motion along a ridge of sand, like forked lightning.

"Ullahee, ullah! is not the soul of yon red-turbaned giant transmigrated into that cursed snake?" cried the jumadar, greatly excited. And then turning round, and edging towards me, he resumed: "Muraj, is it not written that scorpions encompassed by fire will sting themselves to death?"

It is so written," I replied: "well, what of that?”

"Then," quoth the jumadar, “'tis time those same scorpion decoits used their daggers, or else they will be turned into fire-worshippers, like the Guebres of old-Ha, ha, ha!"

"What!" said I, "is there not a chance of their saving themselves by swimming across to the further shore?"

"No, no, Khodawund,” replied the jumadar; "they must be devils then, and not men, to swim over those farrushing waters."

"Plenty of roast-meat for the vultures," quoth Kureem, with a congratulatory chuckle, that at such a time grated on the ear with a strange harsh

ness.

"May their households be accursed!" cried the jumadar, scowling fiercely, and yet all the while affecting to laugh. "By the Prophet, the dogs of burnt fathers shall be toasted brown, like kubabs on a skewer. Didst ever see such a glorious suttee?"†

"Is there not a right good supply of fuel for the suttee," said one of the matchlockmen, in response to the jumadar's fiendish ribaldry, gloating in ecstasy on the billows of fire rolling boomingly past.

"And not a pice to pay to the woodmerchant?" cried a second.

"Where is there a snivelling old Brahmin to mutter a prayer?" shouted a third.

"Here," cried the fourth, with a loud laugh, seizing hold of the goleeah's brother, and giving him a smart smack on the back. The trembling Hindoo looked aghast, as if he had heard blasphemy.

"Ho, where are the tomtoms and cymbals, to celebrate the suttee with due solemnity?" cried another, with a serio-comic phiz.

Kubabs; pieces of roast-meat.

"Here is music," shouted the jumadar, firing off his piece at random. "Is it not the foreign fashion to fire volleys over the dead? Ho, goleeah, when was your mother burnt?"

The goleeah shrunk back, and looked imploringly upwards.

"Hark ye, a word in thy ear, jumadar," said I: "launch your jibes elsewhere; the goleeah is one of my followers."

The jumadar seemed taken quite aback and disconcerted, as he attempted to stammer out some unintelligible apology.

"Look, look!" cried Kureem, abruptly; "I "I see a man's hand stretched forth! Ha, it is gone - the Hist! Heard

smoke hath hidden it! ye not that shriek ?"

"Where? when?" inquired the burqundazes, in a whisper, listening eagerly.

The peon had spoken truth. Again there was heard but too distinctly, issuing from the depths of the blazing jungle, another half-stifled scream, startling and thrilling as a death-knell. Then there succeeded a low-prolonged wail of anguish, wrung from some struggling wretch. Even the fierce and savage Mussulmans, who but a moment ago had been jeering and laughing with ferocious glee and demoniac remorselessness, now seemed thoroughly startled by that wail of agony, and awed by some mysterious dread, stood as if spell-bound, with eyes riveted on the glowing isle. Ay, even the jumadar was silenced; and thenceforward, leaning on the muzzle of his firelock, he gazed on the awful scene without uttering a word.

In mid channel, the illumined Ganges glimmered like a lake of ignited bitumen; and the diverging currents, as they slowly rolled past, rippling and hissing on the glowing shores of this volcanic isle, were crimsoned with the lurid glare, and gleamed with the dazzling vividness of streams of molten lava. In the distance, each sandy islet and jutting bank, vividly lighted up, stood forth in bold and bright relief from the funereal sableness of the farstretching forests; while the clear burnished equipments of the burqundazes,

Tomtoms; Indian drums.

glittering on board the pulwar, flashed back the ruddy refulgence. Innumerable gigantic cranes and vultures, scared from their ancient roosting haunt, flapping their dusky wings, soared on high, and drifted away majestically, or hovered overhead among the murky clouds of smoke, like demons of darkness, ready to pounce down on the devoted wretches writhing amid this fiery deluge.

Day had dawned, and the rising sun found us still lingering in the offing,

beside the isle of the pirates, which was now glowing red and luridly, like the smouldering embers of a vast funereal pyre.

"By the Prophet!" said the jumadar, after a long pause, handing his honeycombed firelock to the young Moor, and slackening his cummerbund," the wasps that stung the muhajun to death have been smoked out, and of a surety shall sting no more. Man the sweeps! Ho, away! What need is there of any further tarrying?"

ALTHOUGH We fear that, as reviews of Mr. Cooke's book, our articles under this head can excite but small interest, because his book has few readers, we redeem our pledge by continuing the History of Party to the present time.

We left off where Mr. Cooke, with remarkable disingenuousness, summed up the deeds of the two parties, at that precise period which enabled him to charge against the Tories (not justly, but plausibly) all the evils of a long war; and to omit the magnificent triumphs, political and military, with which it was concluded. After this display of partiality, or, as we suspect, of blindness, he gives us a fresh definition of Whig and Tory :

"That very ambiguous phrase, the British constitution, has two distinct meanings, and its interpretation must depend upon the party of the person by whom it is pronounced. In the mouth of a Whig, it is a democracy, tempered, but not controlled by the prerogatives of a sovereign, and the intervention of an aristocracy; in the mouth of a Tory, since the accession of the house of Hanover, it is an aristocracy fortified with all the prerogatives of the crown, and tempered, but not controlled, by the admixture of popular influence."

We would challenge Mr. Cooke to produce the Tory writer who makes the aristocracy the cardinal point; what he has put into the mouth of a Tory would have been more accurately ascribed to a Whig. It is for "the great Whig aristocracy" that the powers of government have been claimed by

Whiggish writers. To style the constitution a democracy, is very modern Whiggery indeed.

According to Mr. Cooke, the Whigs had determined, in 1810, " to strip the aristocracy of their nomination boroughs," and " to deprive the Church of its monopoly of political power." It is a great error to treat the nomination boroughs as having been exclusively in the hands of the aristocracy, unless, under that term, we include the aristocracy of wealth. In Gatton, in Malmesbury-even in Old Sarum, and elsewhere, it was money, and not rank or family, that had acquired the influence.

But it is not true that the Whigs had taken up parliamentary reform as a principle of their party: and as for the influence of the Church, it is impossible even to understand what Mr. Cooke means by it. Neither in 1810, nor for twenty years previous or subsequent, was there any indication of the intentions which he confidently ascribes to the Whigs.

Mr. Cooke's misrepresentations of the objects of the Whigs are the more unpardonable, because about this time there were written discussions among all the parties in the state (excepting only the scarcely formed ultra-popular party), and the sentiments of all are recorded. In these, there is not one word upon any constitutional point whatever, or upon any point which divided Whigs and Tories, and not the remotest allusion either to parliamentary reform, or to prerogative, influence,