garding her food with such eager wolfish eyes
that under an impulse of uncontrollable feeling she held out her can of
water to him. He seized and drank the half of it before one of the
pirates had time to dash it from his lips.

Presently a youth, who seemed less robust than his comrades, uttered a
wild shriek, threw up his hands, and fell backwards. At once the
pirates detached him from his oar, threw him into the sea, and made
another captive fill his place. And now, to their inexpressible horror,
the Hazlits discovered that the practice of these wretches--when they
happened to have a super-abundance of captives--was to make them row on
without meat or drink, until they dropt at the oar, and then throw them
overboard! Reader, we do not deal in fiction here, we describe what we
have heard from the mouth of a trustworthy eye-witness.

In these circumstances the harrowing scenes that were enacted before the
English ladies were indeed fitted to arouse that "horror" which poor
Miss Pritty, in her innocence, had imagined to have reached its worst.
We will pass it over. Many of the captives died. A few of the
strongest survived, and these, at last, were fed a little in order to
enable them to complete the journey. Among them was the native
policeman, who had suddenly discovered that his wisest course of action,
in the meantime, was submission.

At last the boats reached a village in one of those rivers whose low and
wooded shores afford shelter to too many nests of Malay pirates even at
the present time--and no wonder! When the rulers and grandees of some
Eastern nations live by plunder, what can be expected of the people?

The few captives who survived were sent ashore. Among them were our
English friends.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

SUDDEN AND BAD NEWS INDUCES SUDDEN AND GOOD ACTION.

About this time there hung a dark cloud over the pagoda in Hong-Kong.
Even the bright eyes of Molly Machowl could not pierce through this
cloud. Rooney himself had lost much of his hopeful disposition. As for
Edgar Berrington, Joe Baldwin, and David Maxwell, they were silently
depressed, for adversity had crushed them very severely of late.

Immediately after their losses, as already detailed or referred to,
stormy weather had for several weeks prevented them from resuming
operations at the wreck, and when at last they succeeded in reaching the
old locality, they found themselves so closely watched by shore boats
that the impos