CHAPTER IV.

UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS.

The voyage of the _Amethyst_ towards tropical seas and shores was far from monotonous, and more than one startling event occurred during its progress. With her snowy canvas spread, her rigging all a-taut (to use a cant nautical phrase), and her deck, whilom so wet, slippery, and foul in dock, well holystoned and swabbed till it was--as Joe Grummet said--white as a lady's hand, the _Amethyst_ was in all her beauty now--all the more so to Derval, who got rid of his sea-sickness ere she cleared the Channel.

"Well, my little man," said Captain Talbot one day, when Joe Grummet was teaching him the use of the quadrant, "how do you feel on your sea legs--eh?"

"Happy, sir--very happy," replied Derval, turning his bright young face, which was flushed by the keen breeze, laden by the iodine of many thousand miles of the fresh, glorious, and open ocean.

"That's right, my lad."

"I have not been so happy for many a year past," said Derval, thinking, perhaps, of his mother.

"Come, come, youngster, it is rather early in life for you to talk of many years, and of happiness in the past tense," said the Captain, amused by a quaintness in the manner of Derval--a manner born of the kind of isolation in which he had lived in his father's house; and save for the annoyance occasionally given to him by the wasp-like nature of Paul Bitts, he would have had nothing to complain of, for the good example and gentlemanly bearing of Captain Talbot and the first and second mates, affected all the ship's company advantageously.

As for the self-won ducking in the West India Dock, Derval hoped Mr. Bitts would forget that and get over it in time; but he never did, and in many ways pursued the feud which he had declared, apparently, on the day Derval first joined the ship.

One morning, when he and Derval were in the middle watch (_i.e._ from 12 to 4 A.M., as the ship was nearing the Azores), the latter, overcome by the heavy saline atmosphere of the sea, by youth and the lateness of the hour, began insensibly to doze, with his head resting on the gunnel of the quarter-deck, and in a kind of half-waking dream he thought himself at Finglecombe: young rabbits scudded past in the grass; the hum of the wind in the rigging aloft, suggested that of bees and insects in the sunshine, and the air seemed to become laden with the familiar fragrance of the apple orchards and garden flowers, till a heavy thwack from the new colt of the inevitable Mr. Paul Bitts awoke him with a nervous start.

"Sleeping are you--on your watch, too! You'll come to the gallows, you young villain!" exclaimed his senior officer, with a malicious gleam in his closely set and serpent-like eyes; "that will teach you to snore like one of Circe's swine. Now go to windward--keep a bright look-out for the revolving light on Cape Flyaway, and if you see the great sea-serpent, don't forget to call the morning watch."

And, with a chuckle, he coiled away the colt in a pocket of his pea-jacket.

"Keep your weather-eye open," he added in a bullying tone; "and don't let me catch you, in the dark, stealing eggs out of the hen-coops!"

"Please, sir," said Derval, rubbing his shoulders, "I never was a thief."

"But thieving begins sometimes, and opportunity is the devil's game."

Under the special tutelage of Joe Grummet, who conceived a great regard for him, Derval, in conjunction with little Tom Titford, learned to hand, reef and steer, to mount away aloft with ease and confidence, and with both to lie out on the arms of a topgallant yard; to use the marling-spike, to splice and knot, and make a grummet. He knew the name of every part of the ship, of every spar and of all the standing and running rigging; for he had great aptitude, and proved a smart scholar at this kind of work; thus, in a little time, it was evident that he would be able to take sights, work a reckoning by log and compass, and calculate variation and leeway. He was taught how to be ready for any emergency of wind or weather; to consider nothing too trivial for consideration, and to remember, as Joe said, "how a little leak may sink a great ship."

Yet his sweet boyish nature still remained; and now, when far away at sea, he thought, in the warmth of his affection, of the handsome pipe he would "bring home for papa"; of the beautiful shells for his little half-brother; and he had visions, too, of a wonderful cap, all over ribbons, for old Patty Fripp.

Overhead the sky was now of the cerulean blue that England never knew, and never will know.

Captain Talbot made his men strictly observe the "clean-shirt-days," as the sailors call Thursday and Sunday; on the latter he always read prayers at the capstan-head to his crew, who were sure to be neatly dressed, and there was much of that silence which prevails in a man-of-war on that day.

On one of these occasions, just after prayers, Mr. Bitts, to Derval's great surprise, approached under the lee of the long-boat, amidship, and said, "Come, youngster--here is a glass of grog for you--just a thimble-full; the sun is over the fore-yard long ago."

Derval shrank from the beverage, which was proffered in a tumbler, but seeing Mr. Bitts' hand in his pocket wherein the colt was coiled, he drank it off, though nearly choked by the effort, and after that, his perceptions of everything were very vague indeed.

The ship seemed to be sailing round and round upon an axis; he tried to speak, but the difficulty of articulation became great, and the half-uttered nonsense he talked hung upon his lips; he felt alternately maudlin and defiant, especially with young Harry Bowline, who greeted him with shouts of laughter, yet good-naturedly endeavoured to get him below, and a struggle ensued between them.

"What is the matter there, forward?" cried the Captain, in surprise, from the quarterdeck.

"Mr. Hampton taken suddenly ill, sir," replied Mr. Bitts with a gratified grin.

"Strang, see what is the matter."

The young Scots doctor went amidships, and returned laughing, to report that which was really the case, "Young Hampton as screwed as an owl!"

"The deuce he is!" exclaimed the Captain with great annoyance; "how came this to pass?"

"The grog as Mr. Bitts gave him has been too strong for him, sir," said Joe Grummet, who took in the whole situation and resented it accordingly; "riglar thumb-grog it must have been, to my mind."

Bitts furtively darted a vicious glance at the boatswain, who received it with perfect equanimity.

"What can that boy know about grog?" said the Captain angrily.

"How to get jolly drunk on it apparently," replied the unabashed Paul Bitts; "he is rather a greenhorn yet."

"Shame on you, sir! this is your fault, not his; and mark me, if it ever happens again, it will be the worse for you and your certificate!"

With this threat, the Captain turned and walked aft.

It may be safely recorded that this never happened again, and Derval, full of shame for the occurrence, did all in his power, by proper and zealous behaviour, to wipe off the stain, for such he deemed it, brought upon him by the malevolence of the third mate.

On the watch by night, under skies where new constellations--new to his eyes at least--were studding heaven, he always felt to the full the awful impressiveness, the utter silence of the sea! Then his thoughts fled home--to that which had latterly been no home to him--and again, in fancy, he saw the lovely dell of Finglecombe, the bay glittering in the sunny distance, the grim rocky portal of the Horses' Hole, the Pixies Parlour, the stately ruins of Oakhampton, the lone waste of Wistmanswood, the cob-cottages, and the old haunted mill at the Mill brook, with its silent and mossy wheel.

What a vast time seemed to have elapsed since he left all these behind him!

One day, when the _Amethyst_ was near the tropic of Cancer, and ploughing the Sargasso Sea, about daybreak, Tom Tyeblock, the second mate, who had the morning watch, reported a sail, with a signal flying on the lee-bow, so the _Amethyst_ was edged down towards her.

She was a large brig, with her sails in considerable disorder. The peak halyards of the spanker gaff had given way, and the sail lay flapping against the mainmast; her spars were topped about in various ways; the maintopsail was full, but the foretopsail lay in the wind; not a soul was to be seen on board, and yet she had signals flying, that said, "Can you send a boat on board?"

When near her, the _Amethyst_ lay to, and Captain Talbot ordered Mr. Bitts to take a brace of revolvers with him and go off to the stranger, with Derval and six men, who hazarded all manner of conjectures as to the vessel.

Had her crew all perished of some terrible disease, or been poisoned by a rascally black cook? If so, terrible sights would await them, of corpses lying about, or festering in bunks and berths. Had there been a mutiny, and had she been scuttled, to sink in time? She did look rather deep in the water, Paul Bitts remarked, adding that she might sink suddenly when they were on board, or alongside, and so carry them down in the vortex she made. Had some dreadful crime compelled her crew to abandon her?

As they neared her, stroke by stroke, the silent, voiceless, and crewless craft, floating in utter silence upon the glassy tropical sea, became an object calculated to impose awe and a solemn sense of great mystery on the boat's crew. At last they were alongside, and as it might have been dangerous to hook on the painter to any part of her, the coxswain held on by boat-hook to the forechains, while with their pulses accelerated by excitement, Paul Bitts and Derval clambered up and leaped on board, the soul of the latter already recoiling within him at anticipation of some sight of horror.

The deck was deserted, but ropes, &c. lay about everywhere in confusion. The longboat was missing, but its chocks remained over the main hatch. The quarter-boat, too, was gone, and the fall-tackles swung idly at the davit-heads.

They descended to the cabin: it was empty; but a fixed lamp was burning on the table, and a clock ticked at the bulkhead; some books, wine-glasses, and a couple of decanters had evidently slipped off the table, and lay in a heap to leeward. A paroquet, in a gilt cage, hung in the skylight. Save this bird, there was no living thing on board.

The cabin berths had not been slept in, and they, as well as the forecastle bunks, were empty. There was no appearance of corpses, no blood, no weapons, or sign of outrage anywhere. No ship's papers could be found, but her name was the _Bonnie Jean of_ ... and the rest was painted out!

After making certain that there was no one on board the derelict, as the weather was becoming squally, and Captain Talbot had a signal flying "to return," Mr. Bitts quitted the brig, and shoved off. Boy-like, Derval had possessed himself of the paroquet--a beautiful little love-bird, half green and scarlet--in its pretty cage, thinking of it as a gift for his little brother at home; but with a malediction, Paul Bitts told him to "let it alone," and as he delayed, he took it out of the cage and tossed it away to leeward, when it soon disappeared.

What could the emergency have been that caused the still flying signal, now answered too late, "Can you send a boat?" to be hoisted, and to what ship had it been exhibited? It could have been to no town or fort in that latitude and longitude. Moreover, the burning lamp showed that the desertion had been most recent. Where, then, were her crew?

Conjectures were endless; a sharp look-out was kept from aloft, but no boats were seen, and as the _Amethyst_ hauled her wind and pursued her course, every eye was turned ever and anon to the floating derelict till she was hull down, and even till her topsails sank beneath the dim and blue horizon astern.

Derval recalled to memory the old and sea-worn wreck he had seen floating in Barnstaple Bay, and the mysterious interest it had excited in his childish mind, when he never thought that a day would come and find him a sailor and far away on tropical waters.

The episode was duly recorded in the ship's log, and it formed the staple object for comment in the forecastle for the next twenty-four hours, eliciting the narration of many a quaint personal adventure from the seamen, and one of these, a somewhat ghastly one, was told by Joe Grummet.

"You must know, Mates," said he, "that when I was a foremastman aboard the _Boomerang_ of Liverpool, bound from Newfoundland to Waterford, in latitude 47 north and longitude 45 west, the look-out men reported a boat in sight, on a dark-grey squally day in April, and bearing about half a mile on the lee-bow, and in the stern-sheets of that identical boat, far out in mid-ocean, sat a man, steering it with an oar! There warn't no vessels in sight, but an iceberg or two, for we were leaving the floes astern going north with the Gulf stream, so the air, you may believe, was bitterly keen and cold. We edged down towards him, but as he seemed to take no notice of us, or heeded a shout or two, I was sent off with three hands in the quarter-boat to overhaul him. My eye! we found as that 'ere boat was steered by a corpse! In her stern-sheets he sat stiff, motionless, lifeless, frozen hard as a rock, but with his head drooping a little forward. He was rigidly upright, with the oar over the back-board of the stern, as if he had been a-sculling, and so hard were his hands frozen to it, that we failed to get it from the death-grasp. The boat had been half full of water that had turned to ice, in which he was wedged to his knees. Over his head and shoulders the spray and spoon-drift of the sea had been washing again and again, freezing as it came. How long he must have been dead, or whence or how he came there, there was nothing to tell us. We held the water with our oars, and held our breath too, as the boat with its terrible occupant, on a current and before the impetus of the wind, went bobbing past us, and we struck out for the ship, anxious only to see the last of that ghastly boatman."

Clear, warm, and sunny was the weather as the _Amethyst_ ploughed the tropical seas, when Derval saw in the sky the wonderful constellation of six stars named the Southern Cross, which, though coeval with the universe, was first seen with awe by Christian eyes in the fifteenth century, when Cada Mosto, the Venetian, steered his caravel into the Southern Sea.

One fine day Captain Talbot and his three mates were amusing themselves with revolver practice, at a quart-bottle slung from the foreyard-arm, at which they fired from the quarterdeck, but as the motion of the ship was considerable, as she was then going before the wind with all her yards square, and consequently rolled heavily, such was the oscillation of the object, that after some twenty shots it was only broken by Mr. Paul Bitts, who was greatly inflated by the circumstance and the applause it won him and now ensued thereon, an event somewhat illustrative of the strange doctrine of chances--a thing happening by luck, without expectation or prevision.

As Mr. Bitts was dropping fresh cartridges into the chambers of his breech-loading pistol, with the air of a candle-snuffer at twenty paces, his eyes fell on Derval, who, with the other two middies, was regarding him with some interest, if it was not a very warm one.

"Well, young fellow, do you think you could do that--eh?" he asked with a grin.

"I should like to try, sir," replied Derval, colouring.

"Oho! the deuce you would! Why, you young----"

"Give him a shot," said Captain Talbot, interrupting some abusive epithet; "take my revolver, Hampton. Grummet, run up another bottle to the yard-arm."

"It will save trouble to let him have a shy at the neck--that is enough for such a marksman!" sneered Paul Bitts.

Derval nervously took the Captain's pistol, for he had never had such an implement in his hand before, raised it, aimed, and while thinking the report was all he would make, fired, and, by a most astounding "fluke," smashed the bottle-neck which was yet dangling from the yard-arm!

A burst of astonishment escaped the crew, while the Captain, who evidently knew how it all came to pass, laughed heartily; but not so Mr. Bitts, who felt in this a fresh cause for hatred, and retired aft, sulkily muttering:

"A sly young beggar, who, I believe, knows more of the world, the flesh, and the devil, than the ship's crew all told, for all that his face and manner are so devilish meek!"

But resting on the reputation so suddenly won, Derval did not, for a long time, indulge in any more pistol-shooting.

Now came the time for crossing the line, and from all he had heard of the rough jokes perpetrated on that occasion Derval had a genuine terror of Mr. Bitts, for the absurdities practised often became insulting and cruel. But such is the improvement now wrought among seamen by the spread of education and general progress of refinement, that these coarse sports are decidedly on the wane, and Captain Talbot contenting himself with ordering extra grog to all to drink the health of Neptune, the equator was passed quietly, and many schemes formed secretly by Mr. Paul Bitts for shaving and sousing in slush both Derval and his chum Tom Titford, ended in nothing, to the great relief of both.

After the _Amethyst_ was some days' sail beyond the equator and running on a wind, with her topsails set and starboard tacks on board, the weather became peculiarly gloomy and squally, and one day, when it was Derval's watch with Mr. Tyeblock, the Captain, who had been studying the barometer below, came suddenly on deck, and looked aloft and at the sky.

"Trim the yards anew, Mr. Tyeblock," said he; "the wind is getting more ahead."

"Very good, sir," and the tacks and sheets were promptly attended to.

Joe Grummet and other old seamen were now seen looking occasionally to windward, for they knew well by the dark clouds that were coming banking up from the horizon that they had foul weather to prepare for; but it came slowly. Two or three days of sunless gloom followed, during which no sights could be had or reckoning properly worked, and the doubts concerning the latter were fated to have a perilous solution.

Night was closing amid mist and obscurity, the sea was rising, the vessel rolling heavily, and all was in considerable confusion in the cabin below, where everything that was not made fast _fetched away_, and went crashing to leeward and got jammed or broken.

Coiled on a chest in the companion-way, Derval had been courting a little sleep, when he heard the hoarse voice of Joe Grummet shouting:

"All hands, ahoy! all hands, ahoy! tumble up and take in sail!"

Thick and fast the rain-drops were now pouring on the deck, gorging the foaming scuppers, rushing as they only do in the tropics; and rolling from side to side, as if she would dip her yard-arms in the mountain-like billows that ran towards her, the _Amethyst_, with her courses set and topsails nearly close-reefed, was ploughing before the wind through a black and midnight sea. Loud and repeated orders rang confusedly on the rising blast, together with the trampling of feet, the creaking of blocks, the bellowing of the wind through the strained rigging, where loose ropes were flying wildly about, and there were the roar, the wash, and fierce incessant gurgle of the sea as it burst over the bows and boiled away beneath the counter.

"Close-reef topsails!" cried Captain Talbot, while the storm deepened; and with others, Derval and Tom Titford, under Mr. Bitts, ascended, to do their part of this task, by the fore-rigging, often as they went embracing the shrouds with their legs and arms; and the ill-conditioned third mate was heard using terrible language as he urged them all up to the cross-trees and out upon the yard.

"Out you go to the starboard ear-ring, you wretched little biscuit-nibbler, and don't look as if you had joined the Shakers!" he exclaimed, administering a blow with his clenched hand to poor Tom Tit, who turned his little white face upbraidingly towards him, and then lay out manfully on one yard-arm as Derval did on the other, and aided by the strong hands of the seamen at the centre of the spar, got the heavy wet canvas tied hard and fast with the reef points.

Poor Tom "lay out" on the yard with a will, above the black and seething deep, with all his strength; but in the fury of the wind it began to fail him, or it might be that in the force of the gale he lost his presence of mind, and when the men began their descent he remained, with his hands convulsively clutching the yard, and his feet on the slippery foot-ropes or in the stirrups thereof.

"Now then, stupid! are you going to sleep there?" cried Paul Bitts from the crosstrees, "or must I rouse you with my colt, and make you dance the binnacle hornpipe when I get you on deck?"

"Mother--oh, Mother!" the boy was heard to shriek, his small voice sounding weirdly on the skirt of the howling blast, as he slipped from the yard-arm, and vanishing into the wrack and obscurity below, was seen no more!

Derval felt his blood grow cold; and as one in a dreadful dream, from which he must waken to find Tom Tit by his side, he made his way, he knew not how, but mechanically, to the deck, where the tragedy was reported to the Captain. But there was not a moment now, either for comment, explanation, or regret, for there came aft a terrible cry from the look-out man at the bowsprit.

"Breakers ahead! breakers on _both_ bows!"

"In the name of heaven, how came breakers here!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, for a moment forgetting that for many hours past he had been unable to verify his whereabouts. Proceeding forward in haste, the Captain went out to the cap of the bowsprit. In peril he was a man whose nerves became as iron! Steadily he looked around him, but even his cheek blanched then, though none could perceive it.

Through the black gloom, a blacker barrier of mighty rocks was rising right ahead. Boiling fiercely before a northern blast, the sea was breaking on them wildly, dashing its white spray as high as the maintop, and, as the waves receded, the sable fronts of two particular or insulated masses were plainly visible from time to time, with a mass of froth between them; while accelerated by the wind astern, and no doubt by the indraught in the reef, for a reef it appeared to be, the stately _Amethyst_ seemed to increase her speed from ten knots an hour to something far beyond it.

Clinging to a belaying pin on the port side, as the ship rushed on, there came into Derval's uninitiated mind only the fear of immediate death, with a quickened circulation of the blood and a painful tightness of the chest, and in this emotion men far his seniors shared, at that dreadful crisis; but now the voice of Captain Talbot, who had obtained his trumpet, was heard even amid the roar of the breakers, and a clear and manly voice it was.

In that tropical region the water and spray that swept over the ship were warm nearly as new milk, and by this time the poultry and pigs were all washed overboard and drowned.

"There is an opening in the reef, three points before the port beam," said the Captain; "Mr. Tyeblock, take the wheel and steer for it--three points, remember! There may be water there to carry us through. Hands to the braces; brace the yards, forward!"

Then, as the _Amethyst_ sprang to the blast, the waves boiled over her lee gunnel; but finding a terrible strain aloft,--

"Let fly the topsail sheets!" was now the order of Captain Talbot, and then, as the canvas flew to ribbons that cracked like thunder in the gale, the topmasts were saved.

"Hard up with the helm now, Tyeblock! Hands to the braces and square away the yards."

Headlong careered the ship on her way through the narrow passage which Talbot's eye had detected, and splendidly was she steered in the skilful hands of Tyeblock, who exultingly declared that he could turn her on a sixpence.

"The reef is astern, we are safe, thanks be to God!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, whose emotion of prayerful gratitude was shared by all who heard him.

Deep water ahead, was reported by Girtline, the second mate, who was in the bows with the hand-lead.

"Heave to, till dawn comes!" was now the Captain's order, and the ship was accordingly hove to, about two miles to leeward of the reef, and a keen look-out was kept in every direction for breakers.

On sounding the well, Joe Grummet reported that the ship had sprung a leak, and the water was rising at the rate of two feet an hour; so the chain pumps were rigged, and all idlers--such as the carpenter, cook, steward, and others--took the first spell thereat, to be immediately followed by a fresh gang, so that the leak made little way.

The gale abated as day came in with its tropical rapidity and splendour, and Captain Talbot knew instantly that the reef they had so nearly perished on, was one of those between the numerous rocky and barren little islets that stud the whole coast around the island of Fernando-de-Noronha, which lies about seventy leagues north-east from the Cabo de San Roque, on the coast of Brazil.

In the full glory of the morning sun, towered up the Campanario (or Belfry), a steep mountain of the isle, a thousand feet in height, and of a form so remarkable, that on one side the upper portion overhangs its base. The Portuguese flag was hoisted on Fort Remedios, as the _Amethyst_ passed on the north-west side of the island, with a soft and pleasant breeze, while the hands were aloft, bending a new set of topsails, or attending to the leak and other damages of the eventful night.

While sent aloft, for practice, to assist in bending on the new foretopsail, Derval had not much time either for reflection on the catastrophe of the past sleepless night, or observing the wonderful multitude of turtle's eggs which cover all the rocks and shore thereabout between the months of December and April; but when excitement and work were over, he, like others, had leisure to think over poor Tom Titford, whose maritime career, to which he had looked forward in all the delight of youth, was thus ended ere it had well begun.

His empty berth and vacant place at table, his uniform cap hanging on a peg, and his little trunk with all his worldly goods remained; but his soft smiling face and his earnest honest eyes were gone from human gaze for ever, and Derval and Hal Bowline were very sad on the subject of his sudden loss, which made them somehow closer friends, while each felt that the victim might have been himself or the other; and both instinctively clenched their fists when they heard Bitts say, with a silent laugh, that "even if the body were found, there would be no coroner's inquest in the latitude of Pedro-de-Noronha, and that young lubbers when they went aloft should remember the maxim of 'one hand for myself, and one for my owners.'"

So the middy, of whose death the passing ship brought tidings, was not Derval Hampton, but little Tom Titford. Had it been himself, he thought, who would have sorrowed for him? and it cannot seem strange that the image of old Patty Fripp occurred to the lonely lad even before that of his own father.

For days after the storm, he felt his legs and arms stiff from the effect of bruises and abrasions sustained in clasping the shrouds when going aloft to reef the topsails.

Days of light breezes and bright weather followed each other now, and on a fine morning in March the cheerful cry of "Land in sight," passed from mouth to mouth on board the _Amethyst_. To Derval's eye, the faint blue mass that rose west-north-west about four miles distant, seemed an island; but to Talbot and many of the crew it was familiar as Cape Frio, a promontory on the Brazilian coast, sixty-four miles eastward of their destination; and with all that interest and curiosity excited by the appearance of a new and strange country, he watched the oval-shaped mass of granite cliff that terminates a long range of mountains, and all its features were distinct by five in the evening, when it was only seven miles distant.

With midnight came squally weather, with thunder and red flashes of lightning, against which, "instant seen and instant lost," rose the black outline of the heavy waves, serrated like the teeth of a saw; but when day came in, the _Amethyst_ was standing in for the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, under full sail, with a steady breeze from the sea. Long ere this, the watch on deck had been busy getting the cables out of the tier, laying them in French-fake on the deck, a peculiar method adopted to let them run out freely, precluding all danger of the links getting foul. They were then bent to the anchors, which were hoisted over the bows and hung by the ring ready for use.

The flag of the Royal Naval Reserve was now run up in a round ball to the gaff, where it was shaken loose, and then "the blessed bit o' bunting," as Joe Grummet admiringly and affectionately called it, floated gallantly on the breeze.

By noon Captain Talbot gave the order to shorten sail; the courses were hauled up; the warm breeze swept through the open rigging; the anchor was let go--the cable swept with a roar through the hawse-hole, and the ship rode at her moorings, in eight fathoms water, while the hands and apprentices went aloft to furl everything fore and aft.

Around was now the noble bay of Rio, studded by fully eighty islets, with the city and all its shipping in the foreground; and the high range of beautiful mountains, clothed with wood to their summits, called the Corcovado, that bound its western plain, in the background. Along the beach lies the main street, called the Rua Dirieta, from which all the others branch off and form a city of palaces, for such it is; and high over all its edifices, conspicuous on a hill that juts into the sea between it and the Praya de Flamingo, towers Nossa Senhora da Gloria, the greatest of the sixty churches in Rio, where eternal spring and summer reign together.

But we do not mean to "do Guide Book," and dwell on the beauties and wonders of Rio de Janeiro; neither do we mean to linger on the _debût_ of Derval or his probationary life as a sailor, for we have much to relate of his future career. Suffice it now, that "bulk" was soon broken on board the _Amethyst_; the cargo started and sent ashore, to be replaced by another for Van Dieman's Land, and by the labour of slaves, who in Rio are made veritable beasts of burden, and are to be seen with iron collars about their necks, and often with masks of tin, that conceal the lower portion of their faces and are secured behind by a common padlock; and the last day of March saw the _Amethyst_ standing out of the bay, with a land breeze, under a press of sail, once more to plough the world of waters.

Ere the vessel sailed Derval felt, but for the last time, the colt of Mr. Paul Bitts, who called him "the lazy scum of a fish-pond," and who delighted in malignant cruelty and the torture of his own species, and highly resented the circumstance of the lad being a little absorbed in a letter from home, brought by the mail steamer. His father had heard of his safety, through the owners, Curry & Co., and no doubt the fright he had received caused him to reproach himself, for a time--but a time only--with his coldness and neglect of his firstborn, and lack of that affection which latterly he had denied him and bestowed entirely on the other son; and poor Derval's honest heart grew very, very full indeed, as he read and re-read the lines his father's hand had traced, and which he valued more than the twenty-pound note he enclosed to him, and which could not be of much use while on the waters of the Southern Sea.

Fortunately he had been well grounded in Euclid and algebra, by the kind tutelage of Mr. Asperges Laud, to whom his thoughts ever went home gratefully; and in the knowledge of his profession he made rapid progress under Joe Grummet, a tutor of a very different kind; while his mind, as active as his body, required and delighted in scientific research. He became a prime favourite with the seamen, knew and understood their characters, and was all the more in favour that he quickly knew the whole parts of the ship from stem to stern, and could act by turns cooper and carpenter, sailmaker and ropemaker, so clever was his head and so skilful was he with his hands.