When I came to myself I was sitting in the small muddy path through which our antagonists had been driven. About a fathom from me, partly hid by the mangrove bushes, lay the dead body of one of the white crew of the polacre. He had fallen on his back across a stout branch, that shot out horizontally from one of the trees at a height of about a foot from the ground, so that, while his feet and legs rested on the soft black alluvial soil on one side of it, his head, with the face turned upwards, and relaxed arms, hung down on the other. He was dressed in the striped shirt already mentioned, largely open at the breast, and wide white petticoat trowsers, that reached to the knee, made of some strong cotton stuff of the same fabric as the India salampore, so that the garment looked like a Greek kilt. It was fastened at the waist by a red silk sash, one end of which hung down over the branch across which he lay, apparently saturated and heavy with black blood, that gave it the appearance of a large purple tassel. His collapsed loins, where he was doubled over the branch, looked as thin and attenuated as if he had been shot in two, and his prominent chest and lower extremities merely connected by his clothing. His feet and legs, as well as his arms, were bare--his shirt-sleeves extending only three inches below his shoulder; and it was a fearful sight to look on the death-blue colour of the muscles, which no longer stood out in well-defined and high relief, but had fallen and assumed the rounded appearance of a woman's limbs. The crown of his head touched the ground, resting on his long black hair, that had been worn turned up into a knot, but was now spread out in a rich tress, a foot beyond him. He had ear-rings in his ears, and a broad gold crucifix tied round his neck by a cord of spun hair--Alas for her whose raven locks composed the strands of it! His mouth was open, but his eyes were closed as if he slept; and a small coal black tuft of hair on his chin, under his nether lip, startled one, from its conspicuousness in contrast with the deathly pallor of his face. He was a very handsome youth, yet the features inverted, as his head hung down, assumed from this circumstance an expression so unusual, yet so soft and so touchingly melancholy, that although I had often looked on death before, even in my own miserable plight I could not help noticing it, and being moved by it. There was no wound that I could see, but thick black gouts were slowly trickling from the white fresh splintered end of the branch that had been split off in the rush, across which he lay; but this was only noticeable at the splinter-mark, the sluggish stream being invisible, while it crept from his body along the dark green bark of the limb of the mangrove-tree. A small pyramid had already been formed on the ground, directly below the end of the branch, by the dropping of the coagulating blood. The whole scene was pervaded by the faint