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Show ! OiaTRODNEY; ll 1 Or, TSie Adventures of j 1 1 Aji Eton Boy... j I 2 BY JSAIES GRANT i i and for a time such cups were thi! cnl? drinking vessels we bad while or. ite island of Alphonso. At last v.-o gained the summit of the mourn In. and with mingled satisfaction satisfac-tion and anxiety in our hearts, swept the horizon with eager eyes. Not a saii was in sight! Far as cur eyesight could reach around us in a mighty circle, rolled the waters of the Southern Atlantic almost tepid wi;h heal, and pale and white, they seemed to palpitate unuei the rays of the unclouded sun. j At our feet lay the whole isle o! Alphonso and its two reck appendages, with the encircling sea boiling in the narrow chasms between them with a fury which was the result of contrary j currents, and which formed a singula! i contrast to its calmness elsewhere. j After a brief rest we prepared to se-' , up the signal-post. ! Tom took off his shirt, and drawint from his pocket a piece of spunyarn which a seaman is seldom without, hi lashed his undergarment to the end of the studding-sail boom, and by tht aid of the hatchet and our hands, we scraped a hole sufficiently deep i I which to erect the spar, and then jam- j med it hard and fast with stones. As ! the shirt was blown out flag fashion upon the wind, we hoped it would prove a sufficient indication to a vessel ves-sel approaching from any quarter that there were people on the island in want of succor. For some hours we lingered on the .i,s- s c e s e g. j. &t e f f t6 j. 5.5,5.5.5,5, fra CHAPTER XXVII. The Island of Alphonso. We had some dread of savages, and being' totally unarmed, we penetrated inland with more anxiety than pleasure pleas-ure at first; but ere long we became convinced that the island was totally destitute of human inhabitants. . Not a vestige of wigwam or hut, of road or path, not even of the smallest track or trail (save such as the wild goats made) was visible anywhere, and thus wo became impressed with new emotions of wonder and awe, in treading tread-ing a soil where man lived not where no human foot seemed to have trod and where only the hum of insect life stirred the solitude of that wild island of the South Atlantic. For a considerable distance we traversed flat ground that was covered with sedge grass, interspersed by shrubs of bvieht & tS 5- S-Sr S- 6- Z E- S Sr 6 5 6 6 6-S e- -iS-1 ing with wonderful brilliance at the verge of the watery horizon. The novelty of our situation kept me long awake, and with my head pillowed pillow-ed on a bundle of dry seaweed, with the sail of the long boat spread over j us as an impromptu tent and for protection pro-tection from the dew, I lay in meditation medita-tion and full of melancholy thoughts ere sleep came upon me, and with it confused dreams of the burning ship, of my secluded home, and of " the schoolboy spot, We long remember, though there long forgot." Again I was at Eton! Again I saw the smooth green playing-fields alive with ardent schoolboys in the merry summer sunshine, and again I heard the clamor of their young voices and the balls rattling on bat and wickets; again I heard the pleasant green leaves rustle in the old woods of the Tudor level plain rose a series of ridges covered cov-ered by trees, and those ridges formed the first slope of the great mountain, which was some thousand feet in height, and also of the great bluff we had first descried at sea. We found Alphonso to be the largest f a group of three islands. It is a mass of rock nearly twelve miles in circumference. The other two are cavernous and inaccessible, and every approach to them is dangerous and difficult, dif-ficult, in consequence of the foaming of the sea about them, so that during the weary days of our sojourn there we made no attempt to explore them, lest the longboat, in our circumstances a priceless property might be swamped swamp-ed or dashed to pieces. times; or again I was in the shady quadrangles w:here the monotonous hum of many classes poring over their studies stole through the mullioned windows on the ambient air; and in my dreaming ear that "drowsy hum" seemed strangely to mingle with the chafing of the surge upon "th' unnumbered unnum-bered pebbles" of the lonely shore close by. At last, overcome by weariness, by lassitude and toil, I slept soundly. CHAPTER XXVIII. We Build a Hut. My old tutor at Eton used to say, quoting some "wise saw,' that "a lazy boy made a lazy man, tust as a crooked crook-ed sapling makes a crooked tree." mountain-top, in the fond hope of seeing see-ing a sail, and then returned slowly downward to the beach, where our shipmates awaited us at the wigwam which now formed our home, and which we jocularly designated the capital cap-ital city of Alphonso. CHAPTER XXIX. A Wild Boar. We felt very much the want of firearms. fire-arms. The air seemed alive with birds the woods with game of several kinds; and now an old musket with a few charges of powder would have proved more useful to us than the : treasure of the Bank of England. Hislop recovered strength rapidly, and his convalescence inspired our lit-. lit-. . , XL VVab IU1 LUiiaie 1U1 ajic, mJWGVoi, while on the island of Alphonso, that my habits were those of activity, and that I was never lymphatic by nature. After dawn next morning we set about the erection of a hut, though we had no other tools than a small hatchet and our claspknives. With these we cut or tore down a great number num-ber of large branches, and stuck them in the earth, selecting a place where two angles of impending rock conveniently conven-iently enough formed two solid walls for our edifice, leaving us but two others to erect. As Tom Lambourne said, "the fellow who cannot use a hammer or ax is only half a man," so we all worked hard with such implements as we had, until our hut w-as complete. We left an entrance next the rocks by which to creep in and out, and then thatched or built over the intertwisted inter-twisted branches with turf, torn up by our hands, and with broad plantain leaves, creepers and all kinds of tendrils ten-drils that had toughness and consistency consist-ency woven to form a roof. tie oauu ol cabiaways hhu ucw v,w dence and vigor, as they had implicit j reliance in his superior knowledge and intelligence. We were never idle; for, unarmed as we were, the task of procuring food for our general store was by no means a sinecure to those who undertook it. Tom Lambourne and John Burnet, the cook, first brought us a valuable contribution in the shape of a great sealion, which was furnished with a rough and shaggy mane, that added greatly to its terrible aspect, for it was an unwieldly brute, as large as a small-sized cow. They had fallen in with it when it lay basking on the beach. Burnet courageously attacked it. with one of the stretchers of the longboat, and dealt it a severe stroke on the head. The animal uttered a hoarse grunt and turned upon him open-mouthed, when he thrust the staff down its throat and held it there till Lambourne Lam-bourne hewed off the head with his hatchet. One or two others were afterward dispatched in the same way; but we Hislop informea me that he had read somewhere that in the month of March, 1506 the same year in which the great Columbus died two adventurers adven-turers of Spain or Portugal, named Tristan da Cunha and Alphonso de Albuquerque, sailed for the Indies on a voyage of discovery, with fourteen great caravels. During this expedition they found three great islands, which they named after Tristan da Cunha, and elsewhere three others, which were named from Alphonso, who, after their fleet had been scattered by a great tempest, sailed sail-ed through the Mozambique channel. He discovered many sea isles and channels hitherto unknown to the Portuguese Por-tuguese or Spaniards, and ultimately reached the Indies, of which he became be-came viceroy for Ferdinand the Catho-tic, Catho-tic, and died in 1515, holding that ofrlc. It is very strange that since that remote period no European country hi'.s turned these islands to any account, ac-count, as they do not lie more than fifty leagues from the general track Df the shipping bound for the coast of Coromandel or the Chinese seas, and in time of war would form a useful and important rendezvous for a fleet. They lie exactly in that portion of t&e wide and mighty ocean where it was fabled and believed a great continent con-tinent would yet be found. The three isles of Tristan da Cunha, which lie some hundred miles distant, have now a mixed population of English, Eng-lish, Portuguese and mulattoes; and a strong garrison was maintained there At the erection of this most primitive primi-tive wigwam we toiled the whole day, save during the scorching interval at noon, and ere nightfall it was complete, with piles of dried leaves and seagrass for couches and bedroom furniture. Therein we placed all our provisions the three bags of bread, two kegs of rum (which, by unanimous consent, were placed under the sole supervision of Hislop); our four casks of water were also brought ashore, though there was no lack of pure springs on the island. t. ,1.:. i,v,iotvi wftrp ;ilr nlacpd OUT had to lie long in wait, and could not catch them only by cutting off- their retreat to the water. Their hearts and tongues were considered con-sidered the best food by the sailors, who broiled them over a fire which we kindled by striking two stones together, to-gether, and letting the sparks fall upon a heap of dry leaves; and to the discovery dis-covery of these impromptu flints we were indebted to Ned Carlton. As for salt, I found plenty of it, baked in the crevices of the rocks up-nr, up-nr, tbo hpach. where the spray had been dried by the hot sunshine. (To be continued.) during the captivity of the Emperor Napoleon at St. Helena. Being thus cast away upon a shore so far from the general track of ships we resolved to make preparations for a probable residence of some time to build a hut wherein to store our provisions, pro-visions, and to use every means for adding to our stock, by angling in the creeks, which seemed to abound with fish, and by hunting in the woods, which teemed with goats and boars running wild; by collecting birds' eggs, as the cliffs seemed to be literally alive with petrels, albatrosses and sea-hens; and all these exertions were the more necessary, as none could foresee the probable length of our sojourn there. A ship might heave in sight tomorrow; tomor-row; but a year might pass before one came near enough to be attracted by our signs. We resolved to have a signal-post erected on the mountain top, a beacon-fire beacon-fire prepared, and amid these and manv other deliberations the night closed in and found us tolerably contented con-tented with our island, and even disposed dis-posed to be merry over misfortunes that we could not control. But considerable speculation was excited ex-cited when Billy Wilkins, the cabin boy, who had been in pursuit of a m tins w ,0 " 1 blankets, the sails and tackle of the longboat, and then the succeeding days were spent in accumulating provisions (as we looked forward with dread to our last biscuit), and a signal-post was erected on the mountain. With Probart, the carpenter, and Henry Warren (two of our stoutest hands), Tom Lambourne and I went upon this duty. Alternately carrying upon our shoulders shoul-ders or dragging in our hands the studding-sail boom, we toiled through wild and untrodden wastes toward the summit of the great and yet nameless conical mountain that rears its lonely scalp to the height of five thousand feet above the waves of the Southern sea. , . The hope that on reaching its summit sum-mit we might descry a sail was an additional ad-ditional incentive to toil up the steep slope without lingering by the way. On leaving a fiat savanna of sedge rass we reached a series of wooded ridges which form the base of the mountain, at every step rousing clouds of birds, especially a species of blackcock black-cock and twice in the jungle we came upon the lair of wild boars of great size and such ferocity of aspect that we were glad to shrink astern of Tat-inne.l Tat-inne.l Tom. who carried the hatchet. little kid along the oeacn, returned tu , us dragging after him a long spar : which he had found among the layer of shingles, bright shells and dusky weed fteposited by the sea; and on ex-amlnation ex-amlnation this spar proved to be one of tbfi lower studding-sail booms of the Eugeuie, and the same which had part-P,r part-P,r O om the brig on the eventful evening of the punishment! , -It is our own property.' said Billj, "and may be useful when we have a fire to light." -Boy Bill, we have a better use for it than burning." said Tattooed Tom "tis the mast for our signal-post, al-readv al-readv made to hand, and we'll step it on the hilltop tomorrow. For that night we bivouacked undci a large tree, the name and genus o wWch were alike f0 Uules some were com e 1"!'' slCpt, others lay wa with the mimnur o the , IToX Sti.ern Cross shin- This jungle was exceedingly difficult of penetration, owing to its density, the number of wild aloes, with creep-in" creep-in" plants, prickly pears and other tropical weeds, of what kind I know-not know-not twined about them, it was a literal lit-eral wilderness of serrated grass blades vellow gourds and great squashy pumpkins, like gigantic vegetable vege-table marrows, all woven into an inextricable in-extricable network of leaves, tendri.s and branches. In other places we had to force a parage through thickets of richly flowered shrubs and tall plants, with mitrhtv leaves, the general greenery of he landscape being increased b the many runnels of fine spring r ! Which retired down trie fi.-sures of the mountain into the plain we had le.. Bv the sides of these runneis we ' frequently paused, and making a enp of a large leaf, filled it with the cool, .nmpid water that gurgled over the rocks, to quench our constant thnt, |
