dged leaves met resistance, when, turning flat
side up, they put forth a score for one of the needle bayonets! No
escape from them. From shoulder to heel one long, hopeless agony. The
fierce sun flaming down, absorbed by the black pall of death! The moon
glimmering in pale white rays of splendor through the moth-eaten holes
upon the finger and the white tomb-stone! All the day and all the
night!

Was it a dream, Captain Brand? No, a frightful reality! Don't you feel a
fresh thorn at every slow pulse of the heart they are aiming at? And
don't you hear those dread croakings of gulls and cormorants flapping in
the air, who have left their prey on the reef to join the vultures in
their feast on the shore? You may almost catch the grating sounds of the
rasping jaws of the sharks as they crowd into the inlet, and rest their
cold noses on the shelly cove where you slept!

Flesh and blood, and pinions and beaks can endure it no longer. A cloud
of carnivorous birds swoop down at last, snap the black pall in their
talons and bills, and fly fighting and screaming away with it. Another
cloud, darker than the rest, light upon the body, and while the
needle-points pierce the palpitating heart, and the breath flutters on
the still clenched lips and nostrils, the eyes are picked out, and the
flesh is torn piecemeal, hide strands and all, till nothing is left but
a hideous white skeleton, with the long bony finger pointing to the
letter L.

The lizards wheetled on the rocks, the alligators lashed the lagoon amid
the steaming mist of the mangrove roots; the sharks and birds returned
to the reefs, the cocoa-nuts waved their tufted tops, the palms crackled
in the shower and gale, and the pure inlet murmured musically on the
shelly shore for years and years over and around the deserted key, until
the whitened bones crumbled into dust, and were borne away by the four
winds of heaven.

* * * * *

The hemp has been tarred and spread, the strands twisted, and the rope
laid up. The knots have been turned in between good sailors and
bad--between pirates and men-of-war's-men--and here Harry Gringo hauls
down his pennant until his reading crew care again to take a cruise with
him in blue water.

THE END.

* * * * *

Standard Works
OF
=Discovery and Adventure in Africa=.

PUBLISHED BY
HARPER & BROTHERS, Franklin Square, N. Y.