ans.

"To-day I sail from the Enchanted group in the good boat Charity bound
to the Feejee Isles.

"FATHERLESS OBERLUS.

"_P.S._--Behind the clinkers, nigh the oven, you will find the old fowl.
Do not kill it; be patient; I leave it setting; if it shall have any
chicks, I hereby bequeath them to you, whoever you may be. But don't
count your chicks before they are hatched."

The fowl proved a starveling rooster, reduced to a sitting posture by
sheer debility.

Oberlus declares that he was bound to the Feejee Isles; but this was
only to throw pursuers on a false scent. For, after a long time, he
arrived, alone in his open boat, at Guayaquil. As his miscreants were
never again beheld on Hood's Isle, it is supposed, either that they
perished for want of water on the passage to Guayaquil, or, what is
quite as probable, were thrown overboard by Oberlus, when he found the
water growing scarce.

From Guayaquil Oberlus proceeded to Payta; and there, with that nameless
witchery peculiar to some of the ugliest animals, wound himself into the
affections of a tawny damsel; prevailing upon her to accompany him back
to his Enchanted Isle; which doubtless he painted as a Paradise of
flowers, not a Tartarus of clinkers.

But unfortunately for the colonization of Hood's Isle with a choice
variety of animated nature, the extraordinary and devilish aspect of
Oberlus made him to be regarded in Payta as a highly suspicious
character. So that being found concealed one night, with matches in his
pocket, under the hull of a small vessel just ready to be launched, he
was seized and thrown into jail.

The jails in most South American towns are generally of the least
wholesome sort. Built of huge cakes of sun-burnt brick, and containing
but one room, without windows or yard, and but one door heavily grated
with wooden bars, they present both within and without the grimmest
aspect. As public edifices they conspicuously stand upon the hot and
dusty Plaza, offering to view, through the gratings, their villainous
and hopeless inmates, burrowing in all sorts of tragic squalor. And
here, for a long time, Oberlus was seen; the central figure of a mongrel
and assassin band; a creature whom it is religion to detest, since it is
philanthropy to hate a misanthrope.

_Note_.--They who may be disposed to question the possibility of
the character above depicted, are referred to the 2d vol. of
Porter's Voyage into the Pacific, where they