“You speak of conquests, sir, before they are achieved. My venerable host and myself are not so defenceless as you may chose to imagine.” While speaking he threw aside the cloth of a side table, from beneath which the colonel and himself were instantly armed with a brace of pistols each. “Here are the death-warrants of four of your party, and these brave fellows at my back can account for two more. I believe, my transatlantic warrior, that we are now something in the condition of Cortes and the Mexicans, when the former overran part of your continent--I being Cortes, armed with artificial thunder and lightning, and you the Indians, with nothing but your pikes and sling, and such other antediluvian inventions. Shipwrecks and seawater are fatal dampers of gunpowder!” “That we are unprovided with firearms, I will not deny,” said Barnstable; “but we are men who are used, from infancy, to depend on our good right arms for life and safety, and we know how to use them, though we should even grapple with death! As for the trifles in your hands, gentlemen, you are not to suppose that men who are trained to look in at one end of a thirty-two pounder, loaded with grape, while the match is put to the other, will so much as wink at their report, though you fired them by fifties. What say you, boys, is a pistol a weapon to repel boarders?” The discordant and disdainful laughs that burst from the restrained seamen were a sufficient pledge of their indifference to so trifling a danger. Borroughcliffe noted their hardened boldness, and taking the supper bell, which was lying near him, he rang it, for a minute, with great violence. The heavy tread of trained footsteps soon followed this extraordinary summons; and presently the several doors of the apartment were opened, and filled with armed soldiers, wearing the livery of the English crown. “If you hold these smaller weapons in such vast contempt,” said the recruiting officer, when he perceived that his men had possessed themselves of all the avenues, “it is in my power to try the virtue of some more formidable. After this exhibition of my strength, gentlemen, I presume you cannot hesitate to submit as prisoners of war.” The seamen had been formed in something like military array, by the assiduity of Manual, during the preceding dialogue; and as the different doors had discovered fresh accessions to the strength of the enemy, the marine industriously offered new fronts, until the small party was completely arranged in a hollow square, that might have proved formidable in a charge, bristled as it was with the deadly pikes of the Ariel. “Here has been some mistake,” said Griffith, after glancing his eye at the formidable array of the soldiers; “I take precedence of Mr. Barnstable, and I shall propose to you, Captain Borroughcliffe, terms that may remove this scene of strife from the dwelling of Colonel Howard.”