fighting, and rapid working of their guns, had achieved, in little more
than three hours, a victory over a foe so vastly superior. Those
cheers, though pleasant sounds to our ears, must have been very much the
contrary to our enemies.

Then, and not till then, did Mr Bryan consent to be carried below. I
have no personal knowledge of what happened after this, for even before
the cheering had ceased, I should have sunk fainting on the deck, had
not the boatswain caught me. When I came to myself, I was undressed in
my hammock, and, except a pain and stiffness in my shoulder, there was
nothing, I thought, very much the matter with me, though when I tried to
rise I found that to do so was out of the question. Spellman and Grey
were in their hammocks close to me. Though Spellman was least seriously
hurt of either of us, his appearance, from having his head bound up with
two huge plasters over his cheeks, was by far the most lugubrious, as he
sat up and looked first at Grey, and then at me, and said, "Well, I hope
you like it."

"Thank you, Miss Susan," said I. "We might be worse off, but we shan't
have to go whistling through the world in future as you will, and if
ever you fall into the hands of savages they'll put a rope through your
cheeks and drag you along like a tame bear."

"You don't think so, Merry, I'm sure," he answered, in a tone of alarm,
which showed that he vividly pictured the possibility of such an
occurrence; "do you, Grey?"

Poor Grey was too weak to say much, but he gave Spellman very little
encouragement to hope for the best, and when Macquoid visited us,
entering into the joke, he said nothing to remove his apprehensions.

My chief anxiety was now about Toby Bluff, and I was very glad to find
that he had not been hurt. At last, when he came to me, I had some
difficulty in quieting his apprehensions, and in persuading him that it
was a very fine thing to be wounded, and that I should have lots of
honour and glory, and be made more of when I got home than I had ever
been before in my life, and that he would share in it without having had
the disagreeable ceremony to go through of being wounded.

"As to the glory, and all that sort of thing, I'd as lief have let it
alone, if it was to cost a bullet through me, Muster Merry," he
answered. "But I'd have been main glad if the mounseers had just shot
me instead of you. It wouldn't have done me no harm to matter."

"He is a faithful fellow, certa