ve no conjectures as to the vessel to which they had
belonged. He knew the articles by sight, one and all of them. They
were the spoils of the corvette that had been washed ashore and fallen
into the hands of the wreckers.

Among them Old Bill saw some things that had appertained to himself.

On the opposite side of the encampment, by another large tent, was a
second pile of ship's equipments, like the first guarded by a sentinel,
who squatted beside it. The sailor looked around in expectation to see
some of the corvette's crew. Some might have escaped, like himself and
his three companions, by reaching the shore on cask, coop, or spar. If
so, they had not fallen into the hands of the wreckers; or if they had,
they were not in the camp, unless, indeed, they might be inside some of
the tents. This was not likely. Most probably they had all been
drowned, or had succumbed to a worse fate than drowning--death at the
hands of the cruel coast robbers who now surrounded the survivor.

The circumstances under which the old sailor made these reflections were
such as to render the last hypothesis sufficiently probable. He was
being pushed about and dragged over the ground by two men, armed with
long curved scimitars, contesting some point with one another,
apparently as to which should be first to cut off his head!

Both of these men appeared to be chiefs, "sheiks", as the sailor heard
them called by their followers; a party of whom, also with arms in their
hands, stood behind each sheik, all seemingly alike eager to perform the
act of decapitation.

So near seemed the old sailor's head to being cut off, that for some
seconds he was not quite sure whether it still remained upon his
shoulders. He could not understand a word that passed between the
contending parties; though there was talk enough to have satisfied a
sitting of parliament, and probably with about the same quantity of
sense in it.

Before it had proceeded far, the sailor began to comprehend, not from
the speeches made, but the gestures that accompanied them, that it was
not the design of either party to cut off his head. The drawn
scimitars, sweeping through the air, were not aimed at his neck, but
rather in mutual menace of one another.

Old Bill could see that there was some quarrel between the two sheiks,
of which he was himself the cause; that the camp was not a unity
consisting of a single chief, his family, and following; but that there
were t