This was too much for poor Donnally. He yelled out, “You’ll believe your own eyes now, yeer honour, when you see one o’dem bodily before you! Let me go--let me go” and, rushing up the ladder, he would, in all probability, have ended his earthly career in the salt sea, had his bullet head not encountered the broadest part of the purser, who was in the act of descending, with such violence, that he shot him out of the companion several feet above the deck, as if he had been discharged from a culverin; but the recoil sent poor Donnally, stunned and senseless, to the bottom of the ladder. There was no standing all this; we laughed outright, and made ourselves known to Mr Douglas, who received us cordially, and in a week we were landed at Port Royal. CHAPTER VI.--The Cruise of the Spark “Ours are the tears, though few, sincerely shed.” Byron, The Corsair, I.35. The only other midshipman on board the cutter beside young Walcolm, whose miserable death we had witnessed, twas a light delicate little fellow, about fourteen years old, of the name of Duncan; he was the smallest boy of his age I ever saw, and had been badly hurt in repelling the attack of the pirate. His wound was a lacerated puncture in the left shoulder from a boarding pike, but it appeared to be healing kindly, and for some days we thought he was doing well. However, about five o’clock in the afternoon on which we made Jamaica, the surgeon accosted Mr Douglas as we were walking the deck together. “I fear little Duncan is going to slip through my fingers after all, sir.” “No!--I thought he had been better.” “So he was till about noon, when a twitching of the muscles came on, which I fear betokens lock jaw; he wavers, too, now and then, a bad sign of itself where there is a fretting wound.” We went below, where, notwithstanding the wind--sail that was let down close to where his hammock was slung, the heat of the small vessel was suffocating. The large coarse tallow candle in the purser’s lantern, that hung beside his shoulder, around which the loathsome cockroaches fluttered like moths in a summer evening, filled the between decks with a rancid oil smell, and with smoke as from a torch, while it ran down and melted like fat before a fire. It cast a dull sickly, gleam on the pale face of the brown-hefted, girlish-looking lad, as he lay in his narrow hammock. When we entered, an old quartermaster was rubbing his legs, which were jerking about like the limbs of a galvanized frog, while two of the boys held his arms, also violently convulsed. The poor little fellow was crying and sobbing most piteously, but made a strong effort to compose himself and “be a man” when he saw us.