"Cut himself loose, do you say, lieutenant?" screamed Somers, heedless of my last observation. "He can't! He has no knife--ha! ha! ha! And if he had, this pistol would be swifter than that; but I'll cut him loose presently, never fear. Look here, Jacques Cocquerel," he continued laying himself flat down on the cliff, and stretching his right arm over it till the mouth of his pistol was within a yard of Cocquerel's head, "this contains payment in full for your kindness to Ally Somers--a debt which I could in no other manner completely repay." At this moment the blue-light suddenly expired, and we were involved in what by contrast was total darkness. We could still, however, hear the frantic laughter and exulting gibes of the merciless old man in answer to Cocquerel's shrieking appeals for mercy; and after a while, when the figures of the two men had become partially visible, we could distinguish the words, "One, two, three," followed by the report of a pistol, and a half minute afterward a dark body shot down the white face of the cliff, and disappeared beneath the waters! The body of Cocquerel never reappeared, and the only tidings I ever heard of Somers were contained in the following paragraph which I read some years afterward in the "Hampshire Telegraph," a journal at that time published at Portsmouth: "The body of an aged, wretched man was found frozen to death in the church-yard on Wednesday morning last, near two adjoining graves, one of which, that of Alice Maynard, recalls the painful circumstances connected with the sad story of the death of that ill-fated, and, as we believe, entirely innocent person. At the inquest holden on Friday, it was ascertained beyond a doubt that the deceased is John Maynard, who, after his wife's untimely death, assumed the name of Somers, and was, we believe, the person who shot a French smuggler, with whom he had quareled, at the back of the Isle of Wight, under somewhat peculiar circumstances, about seven years ago. He was buried in the grave that contains the body of his son, John Alice Maynard, which was interred there shortly before the commission of the homicide just alluded to. There has never been to our knowledge any regular investigation of that affair, but we believe that then, as before, Maynard's pistol was pointed by a frantic and causeless jealousy." [_Plymouth Paper._] There are several mistakes sufficiently obvious to the reader in this paragraph, but of the main fact that John Somers, _alias_ Maynard, perished as described in the Devonshire journal, there can be no reasonable doubt. MISERS. BY F. SOMNER MERRYWEATHER.