sea sand. Mr. and Mrs. Macey and their
children were amongst us, Mr. and Mrs.
Pordage, Mr. Kitten, Mr. Fisher, and Mrs.
Belltott. We mustered only fourteen men,
fifteen women, and seven children. Those
were all that remained of the English who
had lain down to sleep last night, unsuspecting
and happy, on the Island of Silver-Store.

CHAPTER II.

THE PRISON IN THE WOODS.

THERE we all stood, huddled up on the
beach under the burning sun, with the
pirates closing us in on every side—as forlorn
a company of helpless men, women, and
children as ever was gathered together out
of any nation in the world. I kept my
thoughts to myself; but I did not in my
heart believe that any one of our lives was
worth five minutes' purchase.

The man on whose will our safety or
our destruction depended was the Pirate
Captain. All our eyes, by a kind of instinct,
fixed themselves on him—excepting in the
case of the poor children, who, too frightened
to cry, stood hiding their faces against their
mothers' gowns. The ruler who held all
the ruffians about us in subjection, was,
judging by appearances, the very last man I
should have picked out as likely to fill a
place of power among any body of men, good
or bad, under heaven. By nation, he was a
Portuguese; and, by name, he was generally
spoken of among his men as The Don. He
was a little, active, weazen, monkey-faced man,
dressed in the brightest colours and the
finest-made clothes I ever saw. His three-
cornered hat was smartly cocked on one side.
His coat-skirts were stiffened and stuck out,
like the skirts of the dandies in the Mall in
London. When the dance was given at the
Island, I saw no such lace on any lady's dress
there as I saw on his cravat and ruffles.
Round his neck he wore a thick gold chain,
with a diamond cross hanging from it. His
lean, wiry, brown fingers were covered with
rings. Over his shoulders, and falling down
in front to below his waist, he wore a sort of
sling of broad scarlet cloth, embroidered with
beads and little feathers, and holding, at the
lower part, four loaded pistols, two on a side,
lying ready to either hand. His face was
mere skin and bone, and one of his wrinkled
cheeks had a blue scar running all across it,
which drew up that part of his face, and
showed his white shining teeth on that side
of his mouth. An uglier, meaner, weaker,
man-monkey to look at, I never saw; and
yet there was not one of his crew, from his
mate to his cabin-boy, who did not obey him
as if he had been the greatest monarch in
the world. As for the Sambos, including
especially that evil-minded scoundrel,
Christian George King, they never went near
him without seeming to want to roll before
him on the ground, for the sake of winning
the honour of having one of his little dancing-
master's feet set on their black bullock
bodies.

There this fellow stood, while we were
looking at him, with his hands in his pockets,
smoking a cigar. His mate (the one-eyed
Englishman), stood by him; a big, hulking fellow
he was, who might have eaten the Captain
up, pistols and all, and looked about for
more afterwards. The Don himself seemed,
to an ignorant man like me, to have a gift of
speaking in any tongue he liked. I can
testify that his English rattled out of his
crooked lips as fast as if it was natural to
them; making allowance, of course, for his
foreign way of clipping his words.

"Now, Captain," says the big mate, running
his eye over us as if we were a herd of cattle,
"here they are. What's to be done with
them?"

"Are they all off the Island?" says the
Pirate Captain.

"All of them that are alive," says the
mate.

"Good, and very good," says the captain.
"Now, Giant-Georgy, some paper, a pen,
and a horn of ink."

Those things were brought immediately.

"Something to write on," says the Pirate
Captain. "What? Ha! why not a broad
nigger back?"

He pointed with the end of his cigar to
one of the Sambos. The man was pulled
forward, and set down on his knees with his
shoulders rounded. The Pirate Captain laid
the paper on them, and took a dip of ink—then
suddenly turned up his snub-nose with a look
of disgust, and, removing the paper again, took
from his pocket a fine cambric handkerchief
edged with lace, smelt at the scent on it, and
afterwards laid it delicately over the Sambo's
shoulders.

"A table of black man's back, with the
sun on it, close under my nose—ah, Giant-
Georgy, pah! pah!" says the Pirate Captain,
putting the paper on the handkerchief, with
another grimace expressive of great disgust.

He began to write immediately, waiting
from time to time to consider a little with
himself; and once stopping, apparently, to
count our numbers as we stood before him.
To think of that villain knowing how to
write, and of my not being able to make so
much as a decent pothook, if it had been to
save my life!

When he had done, he signed to one of his
men to take the scented handkerchief off the
Sambo's back, and told the sailor he might
keep it for his trouble. Then, holding the
written paper open in his hand, he came
forward a step or two closer to us, and said,
with a grin, and a mock bow, which made
my fingers itch with wanting to be at him:

"I have the honour of addressing myself
to the ladies. According to my reckoning
they are fifteen ladies in all. Does any one of
them belong to the chief officer of the sloop?"