and Count Almante were man and wife. The unhappy bridegroom was then requested to return to his palace in the Cerro, while his bride and her late lover were desired to remain. Upwards of an hour had passed since the count's departure, and nothing further transpired. The governor had resumed his business affairs, and appeared, as before, utterly unconscious of all present. He was however shortly interrupted by the appearance of the guard whom he had despatched with his missive. "Is my order executed ?" inquired the general, looking up for a moment only. Si, mi general, it is," replied the guard. "Nine bullets were fired at the count as he rode round the corner of the street mentioned in your despatch." Tacon then ordered that the marriage and death of Count Almante should be given every publicity, and that legal steps should be taken for the purpose of showing that the property and name of the defunct was inherited by his disconsolate widow. When the general's commands had been fulfilled, and a decent period after the count's demise had transpired, it need scarcely be added that Pedro Mantanez married the countess, with whom he lived happily ever after. FOOTSTEPS. IN the quiet hour of gloaming, When the stars gleam out and the low winds moan, By the side of the desolate hearth. I listen, but not to the homeless leaves, I listen, I listen, and but to hear The footsteps that gladdened my life of; yore, The tiny steps of my first-born He had trod like a man, had he stayed, by this, He tottered to give so oft. His firm tread rings out gallantly, Just as it wont to do, When I used to spring from this same low seat, As he strode through the evening dew. Slow and heavy, and quick and light The echoes around me come, com I ONCE travelled for seventeen days with a cannibal and found him excellent 66 pany." Why does your hair stand so suddenly on end, my worthy reader? My cannibal was no wild South Sea Islander, with face painted vermilion, a brass ring through his hideous nose, and the thighbone of a man stuck horizontally through his matted hair. He was simply a young English sailor, taciturn and somewhat graver than became his years. He spliced the rigging, skipped up the ratlins, and hung on to the great rolls of half-reefed sails, just like his blither companions, and snapped his biscuit, bolted his junk, and tossed off his rum in the ordinary nautical manner, with evidently no more sense of being a Pariah, or an exceptional person in any way, than I, the cabin-passenger in the Levant schooner Argyroupolos, experienced. The man's story was very simple. The trading vessel in which he was five years before I met him, had been wrecked on the shore of New Holland. The captain, a black cook, and three sailors, escaped in a boat with no food but a bag of biscuits, a lump of pork, and a breaker (or small keg) of fresh water; but this last treasure was stove in on landing. The next day, their food all but gone, and no wild animal being visible, the six shipwrecked men began their painful journey through the bush in search of some human habitation. The second day the captain sank from fatigue, and soon after died. The third day one of the men had to be left behind. The fourth day the black cook fell ill, and could go no further. That night the first horrible thought of cannibalism came upon my informant. He described to me with simple pathos his horror at finding the black man dead in the night, his still greater horror, when he stole towards the body at daybreak to cut off a limb, to see his only companion creeping also towards it. Of that unhallowed meal both the starving men ate that day, haunted by a terrible sense of doing an unhallowed thing to which death was almost preferable. The steps that through youth's gay footpaths ranged, It is no fitting place here to describe how Of friends forgotton, of friends estranged, Who once made life and home. each day this horror grew less, or how at last, at the very time that another victim seemed inevitable, two or three natives appeared, and procured them a meal by collecting a peculiar sort of huge fat grub from hollows in the fallen gum-trees. A day or two after this my informant's friend died of eating some poisonous sort of fish he had caught and cooked against the advice of the natives, and gaunt and worn, the sole survivor, my cannibal companion reached at last, after many sufferings and dangers, a native settlement, and was saved. It needs little to prove our argument that debased animal natures, unaccustomed, and, after a time, unable to restrain any animal cravings under severe privations, soon sink into cannibalism. An example. The colony of Hobart Town was established in 1803. In 1814, gangs of bushrangers began to appear. In five years 1822-7, more than one hundred and twenty prisoners escaped from the chain-gangs at Port Macquarie and turned bush-rangers. With few exceptions, the whole of these were either hung, shot by soldiers, starved to death, or were killed and eaten by their comrades. In the year 1822, six convicts escaped from Macquarie; after ten days' hunger two of the men, named Pierce and Greenhill, agreed to kill a third, named Dalton, and eat him, which was done. A few days after, Greenhill butchered another man named Bodenham, and he too was eaten. The next sufferer, John Mather, was allowed half an hour to pray, and then underwent the same terrible fate. After this two men returned to Port Macquarie, surrendered themselves, and in a few days died of exhaustion. Three only were left in the bush; Travers, the weakest, was soon killed, and the survivors dried part of the flesh and took it with them. They had now reached a beautiful country, abounding with kangaroo and emu, but they had no strength to catch them. The two cannibals dragged on glaring at each other, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Pierce, remembering that a dead comrade had said of the monster Greenhill, "that he would kill his own father rather than fast a day," was afraid to sleep or even take a step in advance of him. He kept the solitary axe under his head at night and on his shoulder all day. At last Greenhill fell, either by accident or fatigue, and Pierce, instantly springing on him, struck him dead, and after making a meal travelled on, carrying with him the thigh and arm of his late associate for future use. Pierce afterwards committed other robberies and murders, but was ultimately captured and hung. As There is no question that at a certain point of starvation there arises the horrible craving for cannibalism. Some brave and staunch men resist the dreadful temptation and die (by preference) voluntarily of hunger. The majority, the weaker natures, succumb. This contrast is strikingly shown in the story of the wreck of the Medusa, when, it will be remembered, that the officers were the slowest to yield to cannibalism, and the first to relinquish it. anger boils over into murder, as avarice often corrupts into theft, so starvation among healthy and vigorous men has a tendency to resort to cannibalism. In New Zealand the detestable practice seems to have originated in a revengeful gratification of a conqueror's hatred, but still more in the utter want of flesh food and the absence of all living animals, till the English brought that savoury food, the pig. The steps by which men, in the impiety of their despair, driven half mad by starvation, sink into this last resource of suffering humanity, are depicted with astonishing simple force and naïve exactitude in the following narrative of the miraculous deliverance of Captain David Harrison, of the sloop Peggy. This unfortunate vessel— a poor rickety, single-decked craft-sailed from New York on the 28th of August, 1765, with a cargo of lumber, staves, beeswax, fish, &c., for the Azores, and arrived safe at Fayal on the 5th of the following October. At Fayal, Captain Harrison, an energetic God fearing man, received on board a cargo of twenty pipes of brandy, seventythree pipes of wine, and one negro slave, named Wiltshire, who was sent out from New York as an article of merchandise, had failed to find a purchaser, and was now quietly reshipped for America. On the 22nd of October, Harrison, having got his cargo snugly stowed away, eager to start, went ashore for his letters and despatches, being apprehensive, in so small a vessel, of the dangerous Atlantic seas that rage in winter round the coast of America. It was more haste worse speed with a vengeance in poor Captain Harrison's case. For days after leaving Fayal the wind began to rise, and rip went the only standing jib on board. Still blowing hard, a few days after, away went two parts of the foremast main shrouds, and the next day the continued nor'-wester carried away two fore main shrouds on the starboard side, and so the good ship the Peggy was plucked feather by feather. Till the 12th of November the weather was raging bad, the seas excessively heavy, and the peals of thunder almost ceaseless. A lull of one day followed, and then it began to blow "black December," and harder than ever; the sea growing mountains high. Straining very hard, but still scudding away, the poor Peggy, on the 17th, lost her last spare sail, and while lying-to, in the same terrible gale, the flying-jib blew away. She still, however, made some little struggling way under easy sail till the 1st of December, when another furious gale attacked her, and a dreadful sea broke two of the main chain-plates, and shattered and rendered useless the foresail. The Peggy was now, indeed, in evil case; she had only one bit of canvas left; she leaked excessively, and Captain Harrison, finding provisions running short, had to limit the crew to two pounds of bread a week each, and a quart of water and a pint of wine a day. The alternative was terrible; if the vessel was saved the food would soon be all gone; while even if the food lasted the vessel would most probably soon sink. To add to the misery and despair of the crew of the Peggy, she sighted two vessels during this storm, one from Jamaica, bound for London, the other from Dublin to New York, but they could only speak and pass on. With no hope of escape, the worthy captain had long since had to twist the screw closer. The daily allowance of provisions had been lessened, till every crumb and shred were exhausted, and there remained only about two gallons of dirty water at the bottom of one cask. The men, faint with hunger, and worn out with the ceaseless toil at the pumps, became at last mutinous, and told the captain boldly that as nothing else was left, he must not be surprised if they began to broach the wine and brandy. They soon, unfortunately, plunged into excess, cursed and swore all day, and grew deaf to all sense of honour or duty. The honest captain, however, supported by higher feeling, lived "as much as possible" on the dregs of the water-cask, and to that self-denial he owed the fact of surviving the ghastly complication of calamities that followed. After long hopeless days of tossing at the mercy of winds and waves, the crew of the Peggy, to their extravagant joy, on the morning of the 25th of December, saw a sail to leeward. They all crowded upon deck, and instantly hung out a proper signal of distress, and about eleven A.M. got near enough to speak and to inform the vessel of their plight, and to obtain a welcome assurance of relief. Their petition was a very humble one, only a little bread-all indeed, as the stranger captain assured them, he could spare them, as his own stock was running very low. They must wait, however, he added, till twelve, when he had to make an observation. Relieved by this momentary gleam of hope, Captain Harrison, not only emaciated with fatigue and fasting, but labouring under three painful diseases, a severe flux, impaired sight, and acute rheumatism in the right knee, went down to his cabin for half an hour's restorative sleep. He had not been many minutes there, however, before the sailors came running down in unutterable despair, informing him in scarcely intelligible words that the vessel was making from them as fast as she could, and that they were now left to inevitable destruction. When Harrison crawled upon deck, he found, to his inexpressible grief, that their statement was only too true. The selfish captain had taken the reef out of his topsails and mainsail, and in less than five hours, with a free breeze in his favour, was entirely out sight, As long as the cruel vessel remained even as large as a fly against the horizon, the Peggy's crew hung about the shrouds, or ran in a perfect frenzy from one part of the ship to the other to collect signals of distress. They pierced the air with their cries, which increased as the ship grew smaller and smaller, and strained their very eyeballs to keep her in sight, in a despairing hope that some sudden impulse of pity might yet induce the captain to turn and stretch out a blessed hand of relief. What renders this man's conduct more detestable was the fact that Captain Harrison had promised if he would take his crew from the doomed vessel not to accept a single morsel of his provisions. "My people," says Captain Harrison, "being thus unhappily cut off from all assistance, where they were so fully persuaded of meeting with an instant relief, became now as much dejected with their disappointment as they grew formerly transported with their joy. A desperate kind of gloom sat upon every face, which seemed regardless of the horror that was continually expected to burst upon our heads, at the same time that it indicated a determination to put off the fatal moment to the utmost verge of possibility. Actuated, therefore, by a resolution of holding out as long as we were able, we turned our thoughts upon a pair of pigeons and a cat, which we had not yet destroyed, and which were the only living animals on board besides ourselves. The pigeons we killed for our Christmas dinner, and the day following made away with our cat, casting lots for the several parts of the poor creature, as there were no less than nine of us to partake of the repast. The head fell to my share, and in all my days I never feasted on anything which appeared so delicious to my appetite-the piercing sharpness of necessity had entirely conquered my aversion to such food, and the rage of an incredible hunger rendered that an exquisite regale which, on any other occasion, I must have loathed with the most insuperable disgust. After the cat was entirely consumed, my people began to scrape the barnacles from the ship's bottom; but the relief afforded from this expedient was extremely trivial, as the waves had beaten off the greatest number that were above water, and the men were infinitely too weak to hang over the ship's side to gather them; their continued intoxication seemed, however, in some measure to keep up their spirits, though it hastened the destruction of their health, and every dawn of reflection was carried off in a storm of blasphemy and execration." even Captain Harrison now abandoned all hope. Unable to hold a pen, he from henceforth ceased to even attempt to keep log or journal, but from time to time made some brief memoranda with chalk on the cabin panels. The climax of these horrors was fast approaching. Their last morsel of meat had been the cat of the 26th of December. They "On the 13th of January following," says the captain, "being still tossed about at the discretion of the sea and wind, my mate came to me in the cabin, half drunk, indeed, but with looks so full of horror as partly indicated the nature of their dreadful purpose, and informed me that they could hold out no longer, that their tobacco was entirely exhausted, that they had eaten up all the leather belonging to the pumps, and even the buttons off their jackets, that now they had no chance in nature but to cast lots, and to sacrifice one of themselves for the preservation of the rest.' therefore expected my concurrence in the measure, and desired me to favour them with an immediate determination. Perceiving them in liquor, I endeavoured to soothe them from their purpose as well as I could, begged that they would retire to rest, and that in case Providence did not interpose in their favour by the next morning, we would consult further on the subLuckily for the brave captain, he had ject. Instead of regarding my request, taken such an utter aversion to wine from however, they swore, with a determined the constant steam of the liquors the horror of execration, that what was to be sailors were all day heating in the steerage, done must be done immediately, and that that he subsisted entirely on the refuse it was indifferent to them whether I acwater in the dirty casks, drinking half a quiesced or not, for, although they had pint of it, with a few drops of Turlington's been so kind as to acquaint me with their balsam in it for a flavour, every four-and-resolution, they would oblige me to take twenty hours. In this miserable situation he would have patiently waited for the wave that was to sweep him into eternity, had it not been for the sustaining thought of his wife and young children, who were, perhaps, at that very moment praying for his return. Matters just then, indeed, appeared hopeless even to the youngest, healthiest, and most sanguine. Harrison was powerless with sickness, the men were either too exhausted or too drunk to keep steady at the pumps, it blew harder than ever, and the last sail had just been torn away by a fresh nor'-wester. The vessel was now a mere unguidable wreck, and, worst of all, there was not a single inch of candle left to cheer the long dark winter nights. It seemed impossible that any new misfortune could render their condition more deplorable, and my chance as well as another man, since the general misfortune had levelled all distinction of persons." Captain Harrison, who had long expected some act of violence, had daily kept his pistols loaded by him for fear of surprise; but too weak to resist by force, and finding the sailors deaf to all remonstrances, he merely told them that he would on no account either sanction the death of any one of them, nor partake of the horrible repast. They replied roughly that they did not want his consent, and as to eating or not eating he could just do as he liked. They returned to the steerage to cast lots, and in a few minutes returned to say that they had each taken a chance for their lives, but that the lot had fallen on the negro. The short time that they were absent, and the privacy of the lottery, infused strong suspicions into the captain's mind that the poor black had not had fair play, but on further reflection he only wondered that they had even given him the appearance of a chance. "The miserable black," says Captain Harrison, "well knowing his fate was at hand, and seeing one of the fellows loading a pistol to despatch him, ran to me, begging I would endeavour to save his life. Unfortunately for him I was totally without power. They therefore dragged him into the steerage, where in less than two minutes they shot him through the head. They suffered him to lie but a very little time before they ripped him open, intending to fry part of him for supper, there being a large fire made ready for the purpose. But one of the foremast-men, whose name was John Campbell, being ravenously impatient for food, tore the flesh, and devoured it raw as it was, notwithstanding the fire at his hand, where it could be immediately dressed. The unhappy man paid dear for such an extravagant impatience, for in three days after he died raving mad, and was, the morning of his death, thrown overboard, the survivors, greatly as they wished to preserve his body, being fearful of sharing his fate, if they ventured to make as free with him as with the unfortunate negro. But to return. The black affording my people a luxurious banquet, they were busy the principal part of the night in feasting on him, and did not retire to rest till two in the morning. About eight o'clock the next day, the mate came to ask my orders, relative to pickling the body, an instance of brutality which shocked me so much, that I grasped a pistol, and mustering all the strength I was master of, I swore, unless he instantly quitted the cabin, I would send him after the negro. Seeing me determined, he withdrew, but muttered, as he went out, that the provision should be taken care of without my advice, and that he was sorry he had applied to me, since I was no longer considered as master of the ship. Accordingly he called a council, where it was unanimously agreed to cut the body into small pieces, and to pickle it, after chopping off the head and fingers, which they threw overboard by common consent. 'Three or four days after, as they were stewing and frying some steaks, as they called the slices which they cut from the poor negro (for they stewed these slices first in wine and afterwards either fried or broiled them) I could hear them say, 'Damn | him, though he would not consent to our having any meat, let us give him some,' and immediately one of them came into the cabin, and offered me a steak. I refused the tender with indignation, and desired the person who brought it, at his peril to make the offer a second time. In fact, the constant expectation of death, joined to the miserable state to which I was reduced, through sickness and fatigue, to say nothing of my horror at the food with which I was presented, entirely took away my desire of eating. Add also to this, that the stench of their stewing and frying threw me into an absolute fever, and that this fever was aggravated by a strong scurvy and a violent swelling in my legs. Sinking under such an accumulated load of afflictions, and being, moreover, fearful, if I closed my eyes, that they would surprise and murder me for their next supply, it is no wonder that I lost all relish for sustenance." Notwithstanding the drunkenness of the men, they husbanded the negro's carcass with the greatest economy, setting themselves on the strictest allowance. But when it was nearly expended, Harrison could constantly hear the sailors talking among themselves about the necessity of killing him next rather than cast lots among themselves. The captain had slept little before; now, as one may easily imagine, he slept less; and as the negro's flesh decreased day by day, his apprehensions grew more unbearable. Every meal of this seemed to him a fresh step towards his destruction. So matters went on miserably enough till the 28th or 29th of January, when the drunken mate again entered the cabin at the head of the six sailors, and told him how the negro had been entirely eaten up some days back, and that as no vessel bad appeared to give them even a glimmer of hope, it was necessary to cast lots again, as it was at all events better to die separately than all together. "You are now hungry," the men said, "and will take your chance with us, as you did before when things looked better." Again the captain warmly urged them to desist. He argued that killing the black had been of no use, for they were as greedy and emaciated as ever. He therefore urged them to submit patiently to the dispensations of Providence, and offered to pray with them for immediate relief or immediate death. The men sullenly replied that when they were hungry was no time to cant or pray; they must have something to eat, and if he did not instantly consent |