rry to
have it over, when I had so disagreeable a prospect before me as a
trial, and not impossibly an execution. I was treated with less
harshness than the rest of the prisoners--perhaps on account of my
youth--perhaps because some believed me innocent. I fain hoped on the
latter account.

At length we arrived. I will not stop to describe Charleston. It is a
fine, flourishing city, with a dock-yard, where many of the ships of the
American navy are built. I saw little of it, for soon after the
_Neptune_ had dropped her anchor I was conveyed with the other prisoners
on shore to jail.

The Americans are as fond, fortunately, of the go-ahead system in law as
they are in everything else. In the settlements founded by Spain and
Portugal, we might have been kept six months without being brought into
court; here, before as many days were over, our trial commenced. The
fate of those taken in the schooner was easily settled. Several
robberies were proved against them; and she was sworn to as the same
vessel which had fired into the brig off the coast of Cuba, and had
there carried the pirate flag, besides having also killed and wounded
several officers and men in the United States navy.

The trial of the people in the boat next came on. The others swore that
we belonged to the schooner and the negro, in the bitterness of his
feelings against me, had acknowledged the same. I told my history as my
best defence.

"Ask him if he can swear he no fire de big guns--he no pull and haul--
when we fight de brig," exclaimed the malignant black, perfectly
indifferent to his own fate. I held my peace.

"Prisoner at the bar, can you swear that you did not aid and abet those
engaged in making unlawful war against the United States brig
_Neptune_?"

"I cannot swear to that, because, in a fatal fit of forgetfulness,
seeing every one excited around me, I might have pulled and hauled at
the ropes of the schooner."

"An acknowledgment of his guilt?" exclaimed the counsel for the
Government; and I, with all the rest, was adjudged to be hung at the end
of the week at the yardarm of the brig which had captured us. Never was
a nest of more atrocious pirates broken up, said the public papers,
commenting on the trial, and never were men adjudged to meet a more
deserved doom.

Now the reader will almost be prepared to know how I was saved. I must
own that I never expected to be hung. I felt that I was innocent, and I
trusted that