Ariel.--Safely in harbour, Is the king’s ship; in the deep nook, where, once, Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew, From the still--vexed Bermoothes--there she’s hid. The Tempest, I. ii 227--29. The spirit had indeed fled--the ethereal essence had departed--and the poor wasted and blood-stained husk which lay before us, could no longer be moved by our sorrows, or gratified by our sympathy. Yet I stood riveted to the spot, until I was aroused by the deep-toned voice of Padre Carera, who, lifting up his hands towards heaven, addressed the Almighty in extempore prayer, beseeching his mercy to our erring sister who had just departed. The unusualness of this startled me.--“As the tree falls, so must it lie,” had been the creed of my forefathers, and was mine; but now for the first time I heard a clergyman wrestling in mental agony, and interceding with the God who hath said, “Repent before the night cometh, in which no man can work,” for a sinful creature, whose worn-out frame was now as a clod of the valley. But I had little time for consideration, as presently all the negro servants of the establishment set up a loud howl, as if they had lost their nearest and dearest. “Oh, our poor dear young mistress is dead! She has gone to the bosom of the Virgin! She is gone to be happy!”--“Then why the deuce make such a yelling?” quoth Bang in the other room, when this had been translated to him. Clad to leave the chamber of death, I entered the large hall, where I had left our friend. “I say, Tom--awful work. Hear how the rain pours, and murder--such a flash! Why, in Jamaica, we don’t startle greatly at lightning, but absolutely I heard it hiss--there, again”--the noise of the thunder stopped further colloquy, and the wind now burst down the valley with a loud roar. Don Ricardo joined us. “My good friends--we are in a scrape here--what is to be done?--a melancholy affair altogether.”--Bang’s curiosity here fairly got the better of him. “I say, Don Ricardibus--do--beg pardon, though--do give over this humbugging outlandish lingo of yours--speak like a Christian, in your mother tongue, and leave off your Spanish, which now, since I know it is all a bam, seems to sit as strangely on you as my grandmother’s toupe would on Tom Cringle’s Mary.” “Now do pray, Mr Bang,” said I, when Don Ricardo broke in “Why, Mr Bang, I am, as you now know, a Scotchman.” “How do I know any such thing--that is, for a certainty--while you keep cruising amongst so many lingoes, as Tom there says?” “The docken, man,” said I.--Don Ricardo smiled. “I am a Scotchman, my dear sir; and the same person who, in his youth, was neither more nor less than wee Richy Cloche, in the long town of Kirkaldy, and in his old age Don Ricardo Campana of St Jago de Cuba. But more of this anon,--at present we are in the house of mourning, and alas the day! that it should be so.”