l-fated wretches! ye had escaped the lightning's blast--ye had been
rescued from the swallowing wave--and little thought that you would
encounter an enemy more cruel still--your fellow-creature--man.

The first emotions of Seymour and his party, as soon as they had
recovered from the horror which had been excited by the catastrophe,
were those of pity and commiseration; but their reign was short--

"Revenge impatient rose, And threw his blood-stain'd sword in thunder
down."

The smoking ruins formed the altar at which he received their vows, and
stimulated them to the sacrifice of further victims. Nor did he fail to
inspire the breasts of the other party, indignant at the loss of their
companions, and disappointed at the destruction of what they so ardently
coveted.

Debriseau, who had played no idle game in the previous skirmish, was the
first who rushed to the attack. Crying out, with all the theatrical air
of a Frenchman, which never deserts him, even in the agony of grief,
"_Mes braves compagnons, vous serez venges_!" he flew at McDermot, the
leader of the Irish savages.

A brand of half-consumed wood, with which he aimed at McDermot's head,
broke across the bludgeon which was raised to ward the blow. Debriseau
closed; and, clasping his arms round his neck, tore him with his strong
teeth with the power and ferocity of a tiger, and they rolled together
in the dust, covered with the blood which poured in streams, and
struggling for mastery and life. An American, one of the _Aspasia's_
crew, now closed in the same way with another of the Irish desperadoes,
and as they fell together, twirling the side-locks on the temples of his
antagonist round his fingers to obtain a fulcrum to his lever, he
inserted his thumbs into the sockets of his eyes, forced out the balls
of vision, and left him in agony and in darkness.

"The sword of the Lord!" roared the boatswain, as he fractured the skull
of a third with the mast of the boat, which, with herculean force, he
now whirled round his head.

"Fight, _Aspasias_, you fight for your lives," cried Seymour, who was
everywhere in advance, darting the still burning end of the large spar
into the faces of his antagonists, who recoiled with suffocation and
pain. It was, indeed, a struggle for life; the rage of each had mounted
to delirium. The English sailors, stimulated by the passions of the
moment, felt neither pain nor fatigue from their previous sufferings.
The want