“To be killed and eaten,” added the mate, “is not the worst there is to fear, either. These wretches sometimes torture their helpless victims in a fiendish way. Only a year ago an English sailor, who had been hospitably received on one island, got wrecked on another in a canoe while endeavouring to reach a ship in the offing, and he had not the good fortune to be clubbed outright. His eyelids were cut away by the sharpened shell of the pearl-oyster, and he was then bound to a tree with his exposed orbs turned to the full glare of the sun. When the poor fellow was perfectly blind they skinned the soles of his feet, and then tormented him with firebrands to make him jump about in that wretched condition.” For the present we were safe, however. The hurricane and the tidal wave had destroyed the villages on the coast where we were driven ashore, and the terrified inhabitants had fled inland, leaving the strand strewn with their household gods, and littered with uprooted trees and fragments torn from the dense vegetation. Soon the storm-wrack cleared away, the heavens were a vault of blue faintly laced with thin transparencies of clouds, the sun appeared in all his splendour, playing on the still waters within the reef with a myriad flashing colours, while the rainbow-tinted coral forest seemed to wave gracefully in the shades and gleams as some bright-coloured fish lazily stirred the thick subaqueous undergrowths. A soft pearly haze rested on the purpling ocean, and it was difficult to believe that an awful tempest had so recently swept over the peaceful scene. When night came, the full moon rose radiantly in the east, throwing a broad track of silver across the crisp wavelets, and shedding a soft halo round the sad wreck of the Molly Asthore, so plainly doomed no more through rolling seas to ride again. The neighbouring thicket in which we had made some slight timorous explorations, skirted a tropical forest in which the trees and tangled undergrowth were so closely packed that the hurricane had done but little damage except upon the seaward edge. The cocoanut trees, which are not very firmly rooted, and have at the top of their high cylindrical stems a heavy plume of leaves, among which the nuts nestle in luscious clusters, had suffered severely wherever they were exposed to the fury of the gale. The bread-fruit trees, which are of sturdy growth and well-balanced with thickly-fruited branches, were not much injured.