and a grinning broadside, just as they would
have conned and steered her into a British
harbour.

"Starboard!" said Dodd, in a deep calm voice,
with a motion of his hand.

"Starboard it is."

The pirate wriggled ahead a little. The man
forward made a silent signal to Dodd.

"Port!" said Dodd, quietly.

"Port it is."

But at this critical moment the pirate astern
sent a mischievous shot, and knocked one of
the men to atoms at the helm.

Dodd waved his hand without a word, and
another man rose from the deck, and took his
place in silence, and laid his unshaking hand on
the wheel stained with that man's warm blood
whose place he took.

The high ship was now scarce sixty yards
distant; she seemed to know: she reared her lofty
figure-head with great awful shoots into the air.

But now the panting pirates got their new
foresail hoisted with a joyful shout: it drew, the
schooner gathered way, and their furious consort
close on the Agra's heels just then scourged her
deck with grape.

"Port!" said Dodd, calmly.

"Port it is."

The giant prow darted at the escaping pirate.
That acre of coming canvas took the wind out
of the swift schooner's foresail; it flapped: oh,
then she was doomed! That awful moment
parted the races on board her; the Papuans and
Sooloos, their black faces livid and blue with
horror, leaped yelling into the sea, or crouched
and whimpered; the yellow Malays and brown
Portuguese, though blanched to one colour now,
turned on death like dying panthers, fired two
cannon slap into the ship's bows, and snapped
their muskets and matchlocks at their solitary
executioner on the ship's gangway, and out flew
their knives like crushed wasp's stings. CRASH!
the Indiaman's cut-water in thick smoke beat in
the schooner's broadside: down went her masts
to leeward like fishing-rods whipping the water;
there was a horrible shrieking yell; wild forms
leaped off on the Agra, and were hacked to pieces
almost ere they reached the deck—a surge, a
chasm in the sea, filled with an instant rush of
engulfing waves, a long, awful, grating, grinding
noise, never to be forgotten in this world, all
along under the ship's keel—and the fearful
majestic monster passed on over the blank she
had made, with a pale crew standing silent and
awestruck on her deck; a cluster of wild heads
and staring eyeballs bobbing like corks in her
foaming wake, sole relic of the blotted-out
destroyer; and a wounded man staggering on
the gangway, with hands uplifted and staring
eyes.

Shot in two places, the head and the breast!

With a loud cry of pity and dismay, Sharpe,
Fullalove, Kenealy, and others, rushed to catch
him; but, ere they got near, the captain of the
triumphant ship fell down on his hands and
knees, his head sunk over the gangway, and his
blood ran fast and pattered in the midst of them,
on the deck he had defended so bravely.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT VESUVIUS.

WHEN I first began what proved to be a long
and intimate acquaintance with Mount Vesuvius,
its condition and general appearance were very
different from what they now are. It was in
continuous but very harmless action. For more
than two years, during which I lived in full
view of the volcano, there was never, so far as
I know, a pause of more than five minutes
between its eruptions. A jet of red-hot stones
sprung gracefully from the topmost peak, most
part of which fell back into the capacious throat
from which they had issued, while the few which
escaped never came far enough to reach a visitor.
Constant processions of chair-bearers, carrying
male and female Guy Fawkeses, had worn a firm
staircase upon the extreme edge of an old
lava-stream, up which they proceeded safely and
easily, not forgetting, however, so soon as they
had reached the edge of the cone, to throw
themselves down in well-studied attitudes of exhaustion,
mutely appealing to the sympathies of their
burdens. A descent of some ten feet led into
the crater, which was entirely floored with lava,
blue and brown rock, everywhere at the same
level, save at one point where it rose into a mass
of magnificent precipices, gorgeously coloured
in all hues of green, brown, and orange. Close
against these precipices stood the central chimney
of soft hot black ashes, in shape a gigantic
tile-kiln, continually self-augmented by the
stones flung from its own throat. The
circumference of the crater was, at that time, about a
mile and a half, the edge tolerably horizontal,
excepting on the left of the ascent, where it
rose into a high peak, higher even than the
central chimney or than the adjacent mountain
of Somma, which is the broken shell of the old
Vesuvius, destroyer of the buried cities. Across
the field of lava a path had been formed by
piling on each hand any inconvenient block, and
along this path the refreshed chairmen used to
trot to the opposite edge of the cone, whence a
perfectly map-like view of Pompeii is attained,
the streets, squares, temples, and amphitheatre
looking like an architectural toy.

A descending path through the soft grey ash
of the cone having been also established, the
whole arrangement of the volcano as a
show-place seemed perfect, and looked to the casual
visitor as satisfactory and as likely to last as the
institutions of the country looked to the same
visitor. Yet a steady and very gradual process
of change was going on all the while. From
time to time along the surface of the lava-field
would be seen a line of smoke, looking by day
exactly like burning peat on a moor, but at
night a streak of fire, a streamlet of burning
lava, which flowing—as lava almost always does
—along the top of a self-made ridge, usually
expended its force after a course of eighty or a