Midnight Webs

"Honoured Sir,--Keep a bright look-out ahead, and haul every sheet taut. Them as you thought was sharks a showing their teeth warn't only shams. Take all you gets, and clap 'em...

"Hush, my man," he says, "and try all you can to help." "In course I will, sir," I says; and then, hearing a growl on my right, I says: "That ain't Bill, sir, that's Sam. He's a...

It was hard to realise it at first; but there were both boats rowing slowly away, plainly to be seen in the golden light shed by the flames; and we eight souls, one a fair delic...

"With a will! Mr Ward," I says, and grasping my arms, next moment he was through and lying on the deck aside me, just as we could hear the scrooping noise of Sam closing the hat...

"Hoist Harry on my back," says Grainger; and he took him like a sack; Bantem acting the same part by Captain Dyer; and those two ran off, while we tried to cover them.

And at last, with the weak tears running down my cheeks, I told her of how it could not be; that I should be wronging her, and that she must think no more of me, only as a dear...

"'Nuff to bake 'em down below, Sam," I says, after we'd been quiet for a good hour. "I fancy if I was there, I should be for coming up and lying on the deck, where it's cooler."

That did not seem their way, though they wanted the place for the sake of the great store of arms and ammunition it contained. They wanted to buy it cheap.

But I may as well say now, and have it off my mind, that it has always struck me that, during those peaceful days, when our greatest worry was a hot march, we didn't know when w...

I did not have to ask myself the question twice, for the answer came-- Treachery! And stealing to the slit of window in the room I was in, I peeped cautiously out in time to see...

It was as fierce a fight that, as it was short; for we soon found the alarm spread, and enemies running up on all sides. It was bayonet-drill then; and well we showed the practi...

First of all there came a sort of shadowy rumour that something was wrong with the men of a native regiment, something to do with their caste; and before we had well realised th...

The sun could never have been hotter, nor the ground more parched and dusty than it was now. We were struggling on to reach that temple, which we might perhaps be able to hold t...

We had no time for sadness and sorrow; there was too much to be done. I would not fly a signal at the mast-head, for fear of its bringing back the mutineers; for, though it did...

Lord bless you! it didn't take an instant, and it seemed to me that the elephant only gave that trunk of his a gentle swing against Chunder's side, and he was a couple of yards...

"He came to propose, and papa ordered me to accept him," sobbed Mary; "and when I told papa that I considered myself engaged to poor Frank, he was ready to strike me, and he cur...

Rock, loose stone, thorny undergrowth, which tore his clothes and flesh; huge ferns, whose old frond stumps tripped him up again and again; creepers with snake-like branches: al...

"`And I said, if there's peace in this world to be found'--Go on, Joey, will you?--`The--he heart that is humble might welcome it here,'" sang and said a sturdy-looking, hard-fa...

But John Wilson was quite a favourite with the old man, and the intimacy had arisen when at several times the former had been the bearer of various small gratuities from the gre...

"Yes, yes, coward," she cried. "Loose me, or I'll call for help! Edward! Ned! help me!" she cried loudly; and as he lay just beneath the chamber window, he half raised himself,...

The next minute the great iron door opened with a groan, and he had placed a cancelled cheque bearing frank Marr's name on the back, and a couple of other documents before her.

The sun rose higher and higher; and, save the occasional shout of directions to the man on the rock, the convicts preserved an almost unbroken silence. But, suddenly, Murray saw...

Feeling the impossibility of making farther progress, Murray was surprised to see Wahika, after a little reconnoitring, begin to climb the face of the precipice, finding foothol...

Wahika, too, with the hardihood of the savage, had, sooner even than his fellow-sufferers, shown that he was ready to fight for the last few sparks of life faintly burning in hi...

It was a very slow rate at which they progressed, for they anxiously searched for and examined every trace left by the convicts, though these were comparatively few, Wahika havi...

The distance was but short; but, in pain from their injuries, they proceeded but slowly, Wahika stopping and looking back from time to time till they came up to him.

I've waited these many years, expecting some one or another would give a full and true account of it all, but little thinking it would ever come to be my task; for it's not in m...

There will doubtless be those ready to say that such things do not happen in real life--that rich men do not take poor men into partnership, nor yet give up handsome young wives...