,
And hollow orders cried.
But not a living man could seek,
And not a boat beside.

They sailed away from Haunted Point,
Convoyed by something more:
A boatswain's whistle answered back,
And oar replied to oar.
No matter where the anchor dropped,
The fiends would not aroint,
And every morn the pungy boat
Still lay off Haunted Point.

They hailed; and voices as in fog
Seemed half to speak again--
A devilish chuckling rolled afar,
And mutiny of men.
The parson of the islands said
It was the pirate band,
Whose gold was lost on Haunted Point
And hid with bloody hand.

Until what time a kidnapped boy,
By ruffians whipped and stole,
Should in the groves of Haunted Point
Convert his stealer's soul!
They stole the island parson's child,
He said a little prayer:
Down sank the ground; a gliding sound
Went whispering through the air.

And in the depths the pungy sank;
And, as the divers told,
They sought the wreck to lift again,
And found the pirates' gold.
And in a chapel close at hand
The pious freedmen toil;
No slaves are left in all the land,
Nor any pirates' spoil.

TICKING STONE.

People say that a certain tombstone in the London Tract "Hardshell"
Baptist graveyard, near Newark, Delaware, will give to the ear placed
flat upon it the sound of a ticking like a watch. The London Tract
Church, as its name implies, was the worshipping place of certain
settlers who either came from London, or chose land owned by a London
company. It is a quaint edifice of hard stone, with low-bent bevelled
roof, and surrounded by a stone wall, which has a shingle coping. The
wall incloses many gravestones, their inscriptions showing that very
many of the old worshippers of the church were Welsh. Some large and
healthy forest trees partly shade the graveyard and the grassy and
sandy cross-roads where it stands, near the brink of the pretty White
Clay Creek.

I climbed over the coping of the graveyard wall last spring, and
followed my companion, the narrator of the following story, to what
appeared to be the very oldest portion of the inclosure. The
tombstones were in some cases quite illegible as to inscriptions, worn
bare and smooth by more than a century's rains and chipping frosts,
and others were sunken deep in the grass so as to afford only