still to their more desperate successors, the pirates, at the beginning of the nineteenth; and for the same reason--the facilities they offer (rare in those seas) for procuring wood and water. Hither, then, the black flag often resorted; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes,-- islands untenanted by man,--oftentimes it lay furled up for weeks together; rapine and murder had rest for a season, and the bloody cutlass slept within its scabbard. When this happened, and when it became known beforehand that it _would_ happen, a tent was pitched on shore for my brother, and the chronometers were transported thither for the period of their stay. The island selected for this purpose, amongst the many equally open to their choice, might, according to circumstances, be that which offered the best anchorage, or that from which the reëmbarkation was easiest, or that which allowed the readiest access to wood and water. But for some, or all these advantages, the particular island most generally honored by the piratical custom and "good will" was one known to American navigators as "The Woodcutter's Island." There was some old tradition--and I know not but it was a tradition dating from the times of Dampier--that a Spaniard or an Indian settler in this island (relying, perhaps, too entirely upon the protection of perfect solitude) had been murdered in pure wantonness by some of the lawless rovers who frequented this solitary archipelago. Whether it were from some peculiar atrocity of bad faith in the act, or from the sanctity of the man, or the deep solitude of the island, or with a view to the peculiar edification of mariners in these semi-Christian seas, so, however, it was, and attested by generations of sea vagabonds, (for most of the armed roamers in these ocean Zaaras at one time were of a suspicious order,) that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight began to prevail, a sound arose--audible to other islands, and to every ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood--of a woodcutter's axe. Sturdy were the blows, and steady the succession in which they followed: some even fancied they could hear that sort of groaning respiration which is made by men who use an axe, or by those who in towns ply the "three-man beetle" of Falstaff, as paviers; echoes they certainly heard of every blow, from the profound woods and the sylvan precipices on the margin of the shores; which, however, should rather indicate that the sounds were _not_ supernatural, since, if a visual object, falling under hyper-physical or cata-physical laws, loses its shadow, by parity of argument, an audible object, in the same circumstances, should lose its echo. But this was the story; and amongst sailors there is as little variety of versions in telling any true sea story as there is in a log book, or in "The Flying Dutchman:" _literatim_ fidelity is, with a sailor, a point at once of religious faith and worldly honor. The close of the story was--that after,