The chief's family and friends interposed to save him, declaring that he would be killed if he went on board of the ship. The captain expostulated with them and the tumult increased. The lieutenant of marines wanted to fire, but Cook refused the pet mission. The tumult soon became a battle, and then he ordered his men to fire. As he was trying to save his party he was struck with a club, which partially stunned him, and then he was stabbed in the back of the neck by an iron dagger. He fell into shallow water, and the savages threw themselves upon him. A struggle ensued, and he was hauled on the beach by his foes, where they stabbed him in turn in their barbarous rage. His body lay on the beach, and it might have been recovered, but it was not. Only a portion of his remains were obtained, and they were buried at sea. Thus perished Captain James Cook, and all England mourned him. [Signature: William S. Adams.] JOHN HOWARD[15] [Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.] By HARRIET G. WALKER (1726-1790) [Illustration: John Howard.] John Howard was born in Hackney, Middlesex County, England, September 2, 1726. The only existing record of this fact is the inscription upon his monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. His parentage came through a somewhat obscure family, his father being sometimes mentioned as an upholsterer and sometimes as a merchant of moderate means. Of his mother we know only her name--Chomley--and that she died when her second child, and only son, was an infant. The father was a strict, sturdy, honest, severe Puritan, the marks of whose character ever remained on the character of the son. The motherless boy seems to have passed unnoticed through the weary days of a sickly childhood, and the usual martyrdom of the "dullest boy in the school," under first one tutor and then another, to his sixteenth year, when he left school and books, as he afterward testifies, "not thoroughly knowing any one thing." How much does any boy or girl thoroughly know of any one thing at sixteen? Surely not enough to warrant his removal from school. But not so reasoned the father of John Howard, for we find him at this age apprenticing his only son to Alderman Newham, a wholesale grocer on Watling Street, London. That this was not a change made from pecuniary necessity is evidenced by the liberal provision made for the boy. We are told that his father paid L700 for his fee of apprenticeship, and provided him a separate suite of apartments, a servant, and a pair of saddle-horses! The inference is that young John's progress in school was not such as to warrant his continuance at his books. His letters and manuscripts still in existence reveal a lamentable deficiency in orthography and the handling of the king's English.