aple dish--the stranger would follow on in the
path thus indicated, till at last he would come out in a noiseless nook,
and find his only welcome, a dead man--his sole greeting the
inscription over a grave. Here, in 1813, fell, in a daybreak duel, a
lieutenant of the U.S. frigate Essex, aged twenty-one: attaining his
majority in death.

It is but fit that, like those old monastic institutions of Europe,
whose inmates go not out of their own walls to be inurned, but are
entombed there where they die, the Encantadas, too, should bury their
own dead, even as the great general monastery of earth does hers.

It is known that burial in the ocean is a pure necessity of sea-faring
life, and that it is only done when land is far astern, and not clearly
visible from the bow. Hence, to vessels cruising in the vicinity of the
Enchanted Isles, they afford a convenient Potter's Field. The interment
over, some good-natured forecastle poet and artist seizes his
paint-brush, and inscribes a doggerel epitaph. When, after a long lapse
of time, other good-natured seamen chance to come upon the spot, they
usually make a table of the mound, and quaff a friendly can to the poor
soul's repose.

As a specimen of these epitaphs, take the following, found in a bleak
gorge of Chatham Isle:--

"Oh, Brother Jack, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
Just so game, and just so gay,
But now, alack, they've stopped my pay.
No more I peep out of my blinkers,
Here I be--tucked in with clinkers!"

THE BELL-TOWER.

In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank
mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance,
seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in
forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.

As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy
mound--last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never
lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable,
and true gauge which cometh by prostration--so westward from what seems
the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain.

From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A
stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the
great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna.

Like Babel's, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth,
following the second deluge, when the waters of