through the valley into the little fake; but my pursuers seemed to be gaining upon me ; their hissing sounded louded and nearer: I already felt the panting of their fiery breath; when reaching the banks of the stream, and summoning all my remaining energies, I cleared it at one desperate bound, and fell upon the opposite bank exhausted and insensible.

"It was deep night when my consciousness returned. I saw nothing more of my dreadful pursuers. The progress of the burning grass had been arrested by the river, but the grove was still on fire, its few remaining trunks, as they were fanned by the night breeze, looking like flaming columns supporting a canopy of smoke. When the sun arose on the following morning my self-possession had returned, and I not only determined to reason with my terrors, but summoned resolution enough to revisit the spot where they had been so powerfully excited. Wading the river I passed across the blackened ground which had so lately been covered with grass, till I reached the grove, whose burning embers would not allow me to

enter it, but as I skirted round, Tobserved a track of consumed moss and fern Teading to the foot of the rock upon which I had made the burnt offering of the roots. From these p pearances I concluded that the wind 'had blown over some of their ashes, which must have fired

the
de grove

But

the train of dry herbage below, and have thus occasioned the conflagration of I remain not the è 'less persuaded that I saw the described, and torch-bearing Furies that I have I believe the shock then received contributed not a little to aggravate that morbid state of the nervous system with which I was already afflicted, and under which I have ever since been suffering.

***What a fearful and inscrutable mystery is the mind of man! and who shall dare to limit its boundless powers and faculties by his own narrow experience! How can he judge of another's senses and perceptions, or tell what new and unaccountable developements may be opened to one being, and shut up from all the rest. If I press my finger upon my eye I see

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circles of gold and blue light, and shall it be said that I am deceived, because these appear

ances are invisible to ex every one else. Externally, and with my bodily eye I have seen strange sights, visions, such as have perhaps been never before presented to mortal observation; but if any one were insolent enough to insinuate that I am an enthusiast, that my faculties are deranged, that I have been deluded, I would tell him he lies in the throat. I hate such ignorant bigotry, I am neither a liar, nor an idiot. I write down nothing but what I have seen.

"The confined bird flutters against every bar of its cage in the hope of finding some aperture large enough to allow its escape; the imprisoned, wild beast walks round and round his den, and explores the minutest opening with the same forlorn but indestructible expectation. So have I repeatedly paced the shores of my island prison, following the beach and all its sinuosities, round, and round, and round, till my mind became sick and giddy. Then have

I struck desperately inward, penetrating dense masses of luxuriant grass and underwood that encompassed me me about like a vegetable sea; plunging into dark forests of sassafras, cedar, and palm trees, through whose interwoven ca. nopy of boughs neither the rays of the sun, nor even the air of Heaven, could pierce; or fording swampy glens and morasses covered with mangroves, stunted gum-trees, and the arbo rescent fern. I have climbed gorges of the rock bristled with the flowering aloes, from whose base the turpentine tree shot high in the air, while bamboos and lianas coiling around its trunk like serpents, met at top, and formed festoons and garlands that swung backwards and forwards as the wind blew strongly through the rocky ravine. Upland and plain, forest and meadow, rock and turf, sand and shingle, glades, copses, and dells, swamps and jungles, I have › traversed, threaded, crossed, and recrossed them.

all;

I know

every inch of my prison, and I

gnash my teeth in

the bitterness of ineffectual rage when I feel that there is no possibility of

my escape. Solitary imprisonment!-solitary

imprisonment for life! No man of active and cultivated intellect could bear it without madness. But there is one hope left to him :-he may cheat his gaolers he may make his escape by death! Ha! that must not be forgotten!''

" At the opposite extremity of the island from that where we were shipwrecked, there is a bluff craggy headland, half way down the precipitous sides of which a tree, or rather a huge branch, rooted in a fissure of rock, shoots out horizontally over the sea. To this did I clamber down, and crawling along to its farther extremity, which swayed and bent with my weight, I found a perilous perch that seemed to be congenial to my feelings, because it illustrated my own fate. Like me this naked solitary bough, attached to the earth and yet not belonging to it; separated from its fellows, removed from its proper sphere, suspended in strange loneliness as a butt and plaything to the elements, clinging in precarious agony to the rock from which it seems anxious to detach itself, was yet condemned to a painful and tan