in English and French and Portuguese, and in
the heathen gibberish of the East. As the men were sponging and ramming
home in the first fury of hatred, the carpenter jumped out under the
battle-lanthorn at the main hatch, crying in a wild voice that the old
eighteens had burst, killing half their crews and blowing up the gundeck
above them. At this many of our men broke and ran for the hatches.

"Back, back to your quarters! The first man to desert will be shot
down!"

It was the same strange voice that had quelled the mutiny on the John,
that had awed the men of Kirkcudbright. The tackles were seized and
the guns run out once more, and fired, and served again in an agony of
haste. In the darkness shot shrieked hither and thither about us like
demons, striking everywhere, sometimes sending casks of salt water over
the nettings. Incessantly the quartermaster walked to and fro scattering
sand over the black pools that kept running, running together as the
minutes were tolled out, and the red flashes from the guns revealed
faces in a hideous contortion. One little fellow, with whom I had had
many a lively word at mess, had his arm taken off at the shoulder as he
went skipping past me with the charge under his coat, and I have but to
listen now to hear the patter of the blood on the boards as they carried
him away to the cockpit below. Out of the main hatch, from that charnel
house, rose one continuous cry. It was an odd trick of the mind or soul
that put a hymn on my lips in that dreadful hour of carnage and human
misery, when men were calling the name of their Maker in vain. But as
I ran from crew to crew, I sang over and over again a long-forgotten
Christmas carol, and with it came a fleeting memory of my mother on the
stairs at Carvel Hall, and of the negroes gathered on the lawn without.

Suddenly, glancing up at the dim cloud of sails above, I saw that we
were aback and making sternway. We might have tossed a biscuit aboard
the big Serapis as she glided ahead of us. The broadsides thundered, and
great ragged scantlings brake from our bulwarks and flew as high as the
mizzen-top; and the shrieks and groans redoubled. Involuntarily my
eyes sought the poop, and I gave a sigh of relief at the sight of the
commanding figure in the midst of the whirling smoke. We shotted our
guns with double-headed, manned our lee braces, and gathered headway.

"Stand by to board!"

The boatswains' whistles trilled through the ship, pike