evil, you are betrayed by your own
hideous cruelty!'

"He rose and struck at me blindly; staggered, and found his filthy voice
in a shriek of rage.

"'Jorinder! make hell of the galley-fire! Heat some irons red and fetch
out a bucket of pitch. We'll learn this dandy galloot his manners!'

"Wrought to the snapping-point of desperation, I sprang at and closed
with him; and we went down on the floor together with a heavy crash.
I was weaponless, but I would choke and strangle him with my hands. I had
him under, my fingers crookt in his throat. His eyeballs slipped forward,
like banana ends squeezed from their skins; he could not speak or cry,
but he put up one feeble hand and flapped it aimlessly. At that, in the
midst of my fury, I glanced above me, and saw a press of dim faces
crowding a dusk hatch; and from them a shadowy arm came through, pointing
a weapon; and all my soul reeled sick, and I only longed to be left time
to destroy the venomous horror beneath me before I passed.

"It was not to be. Something, a physical sensation like the jerk of a
hiccup, shook my frame; and immediately the waters of being seemed to
burst their dam and flow out peaceably into a valley of rest."

William Tyrwhitt paused, and "Well?" said I.

"You see me here," he said. "I woke this morning, and found myself lying
on the floor of that shattered and battered closet, and a starved demon
of a cat licking up something from the boards. When I drove her away,
there was a patch there like ancient dried blood."

"And how about your head?"

"My head? Why, the bullet seemed stuck in it between the temples; and
there I am afraid it is still."

"Just so. Now, William Tyrwhitt, you must take a Turkish, bath and some
cooling salts, and then come and tell me all about it again."

"Ah! you don't believe me, I see. I never supposed you would.
Good-night!"

But, when he was gone, I sat ruminating.

"That Captain Iron," I thought, "walked over the great rent in the floor
without falling through. Well, well!"

A LAZY ROMANCE

I had slept but two nights at King's Cobb, when I saw distinctly that the
novel with which I was to revolutionize society and my own fortunes, and
with the purpose of writing which in an unvexed seclusion I had buried
myself in this expedient hamlet on the South Coast, was withered in the
bud beyond redemption. To this lamentable canker of a seedling hope the
eternal harmony of the sea was a principal contributo