string of black beads, holding a gold and ebony crucifix,
pendent in the water. The eyes of the one with half a body had been
picked out by the gulls, but he still possessed a fang-like tusk,
sticking through a hare-lip under a fringe of wiry mustache, which gave
me a tolerable correct idea of his temper even without seeing his eyes.
The truck and shivered stump of the main-top-mast, too, with the
piratical flag still twisted around it, lay across his chest; but, as we
approached, an eagle seized it in his beak, and, tearing it in tattered
shreds, flew aloft, with the remains of the parted halliards streaming
below his talons.

"The large lump rolling slowly over beside him had the crown of the head
shaved, and the mouth and eyes were wide staring open, as if it was
chanting forth a misericordia for his own soul. As I stood gazing at
these revolting objects, and while the men were firing pistols and
slashing the oars and boat-hooks around to drive away the greedy birds,
a huge pelican, unmindful of powder or ash, made one dashing swoop into
the sail, and as he came up and spread his broad pinions--nearly as
broad as the sail itself--he held in his pouch the crucifix from the
padre's neck, and as he slowly flapped his great wings and sailed away,
with the beads dropping pit-a-pat-pat on the glassy surface of the
water, a cloud of cormorants, gulls, and vultures took after him to
steal his plunder.

"At the same time the sharks--many of them resting their cold, sharp
noses on the very leech of the top-sail--waiting like hungry dogs for a
bone, with a thousand more diving and cutting in the water beneath, at
last cut through the canvas belly of the sail, and, before you could
think, the floating corpses were within their serrated jaws. In another
moment the bodies rose again to the surface outside the sail and wreck;
then another dash from the monsters, and a greedy dive and peck from the
birds; a few bubbles and shreds of black threads, and that was the last
of those wretches until the sea shall give up its dead.

"As for Hardy, he pulled higher up the gorge, and examined the rocks and
pools on both sides, but saw nothing living or dead, and we both
returned to the ship."

Had Dick Hardy landed at the flat rock where the eddy swept in under the
Lion's paws, he might have seen the footprint of a man, with a straw
slipper in it; and following the track a few yards farther, he would
have passed his sword through a villai