suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman's persecution. It was exactly the crash, so familiar to many ears on board the neighboring vessels, which expresses the harsh tearing asunder of the fibres, caused by the weight of the trunk in falling; beginning slowly, increasing rapidly, and terminating in one rush of rending. This over,--one tree felled "towards his winter store,"--there was an interval; man must have rest; and the old woodman, after working for more than a century, must want repose. Time enough to begin again after a quarter of an hour's relaxation. Sure enough, in that space of time, again began, in the words of Comus, "the wonted roar amid the woods." Again the blows became quicker, as the catastrophe drew nearer; again the final crash resounded; and again the mighty echoes travelled through the solitary forests, and were taken up by all the islands near and far, like Joanna's laugh amongst the Westmoreland hills, to the astonishment of the silent ocean. Yet, wherefore should the ocean be astonished?--he that had heard this nightly tumult, by all accounts, for more than a century. My brother, however, poor Pink, _was_ astonished, in good earnest, being, in that respect, of the _genus attonitorum_; and as often as the gentlemen pirates steered their course for the Gallapagos, he would sink in spirit before the trials he might be summoned to face. No second person was ever put on shore with Pink, lest poor Pink and he might become jovial over the liquor, and the chronometers be broken or neglected; for a considerable quantity of spirits was necessarily landed, as well as of provisions, because sometimes a sudden change of weather, or the sudden appearance of a suspicious sail, might draw the ship off the island for a fortnight. My brother could have pleaded his fears without shame; but he had a character to maintain with the sailors: he was respected equally for his seamanship and his shipmanship. [6] By the way, when it is considered that one half of a sailor's professional science refers him to the stars, (though it is true the other half refers him to the sails and shrouds of a ship,) just as, in geodesical operations, one part is referred to heaven and one to earth, when this is considered, another argument arises for the superstition of sailors, so far as it is astrological. They who know (but know the _oti_ without knowing the _dia ti_) that the stars have much to do in guiding their own movements, which are yet so far from the stars, and, to all appearance, so little connected with them, may be excused for supposing that the stars are connected astrologically with human destinies. But this by the way. The sailors, looking to Pink's double skill, and to his experience on shore, (more astonishing than all beside, being