adversity, or secret and unavengeable wrongs, had driven from Christian
society to seek the melancholy solitude or the guilty adventures of the
sea. At any rate, long as those ruins of seats on Barrington remain,
the most singular monuments are furnished to the fact, that all of the
Buccaneers were not unmitigated monsters.

"But during my ramble on the isle I was not long in discovering other
tokens, of things quite in accordance with those wild traits, popularly,
and no doubt truly enough, imputed to the freebooters at large. Had I
picked up old sails and rusty hoops I would only have thought of the
ship's carpenter and cooper. But I found old cutlasses and daggers
reduced to mere threads of rust, which, doubtless, had stuck between
Spanish ribs ere now. These were signs of the murderer and robber; the
reveler likewise had left his trace. Mixed with shells, fragments of
broken jars were lying here and there, high up upon the beach. They were
precisely like the jars now used upon the Spanish coast for the wine and
Pisco spirits of that country.

"With a rusty dagger-fragment in one hand, and a bit of a wine-jar in
another, I sat me down on the ruinous green sofa I have spoken of, and
bethought me long and deeply of these same Buccaneers. Could it be
possible, that they robbed and murdered one day, reveled the next, and
rested themselves by turning meditative philosophers, rural poets, and
seat-builders on the third? Not very improbable, after all. For consider
the vacillations of a man. Still, strange as it may seem, I must also
abide by the more charitable thought; namely, that among these
adventurers were some gentlemanly, companionable souls, capable of
genuine tranquillity and virtue."

* * * * *

SKETCH SEVENTH.

CHARLES'S ISLE AND THE DOG-KING.

--So with outragious cry,
A thousand villeins round about him swarmed
Out of the rocks and caves adjoining nye;
Vile caitive wretches, ragged, rude, deformed;
All threatning death, all in straunge manner armed;
Some with unweldy clubs, some with long speares.
Some rusty knives, some staves in fier warmd.

* * * * *

We will not be of any occupation,
Let such vile vassals, born to base vocation,
Drudge in the world, and for their living droyle,
Which have no wit to live withouten toyle.

Southwest of Barrington lies Charles's Isle. And hereby hangs a history
which I gath