His brown ringlets still clustered over his marble forehead, but they were drenched in the cold sweat of death. The surgeon could do nothing for him, and had left him; but our old captain--bless him for it--I little expected, from his usual crusty bearing, to find him so employed--had knelt by his side, and, whilst he read from the Prayer-book one of those beautiful petitions in our Church service to Almighty God, for mercy to the passing soul of one so young, and so early cut off, the tears trickled down the old man’s cheeks, and filled the furrows worn in them by the washing up of many a salt spray. On the other side of his narrow bed, fomenting the rigid muscles of his neck and chest, sate Mistress Connolly, one of three women on board--a rough enough creature, Heaven knows! in common weather; but her stifled sobs showed that the mournful sight had stirred up all the woman within her. She had opened the bosom of the poor boy’s shirt, and untying the riband that fastened a small gold crucifix round his neck, she placed it in his cold hand. The young midshipman was of a respectable family in Limerick, her native place, and a Catholic--another strand of the cord that bound her to him. When the Captain finished reading, he bent over the departing youth and kissed his cheek. “Your young messmate just now desired to see you, Mr Cringle, but it is too late, he is insensible and dying.” Whilst he spoke, a strong shiver passed through the boy’s frame, his face became slightly convulsed, and all was over! The Captain rose, and Connolly, with a delicacy of feeling which many might not have looked for in her situation, spread one of our clean mess tablecloths over the body. “And is it really gone you are, my poor dear boy!” forgetting all difference of rank in the fulness of her heart. “Who will tell this to your mother, and nobody here to wake you but ould Kate Connolly, and no time will they be giving me, nor whisky--Ochon! ochon!” But enough and to spare of this piping work. The boatswain’s whistle now called me to the gangway, to superintend the handling up, from a shore boat alongside, a supply of the grand staples of the island--ducks and onions. The three Mudians in her were characteristic samples of the inhabitants. Their faces and sins, where exposed, were not tanned, but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun. They guessed and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye when they spoke to you. They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they could get their 365 Islands--so they call the large stones on which they live--under weigh, they would not be long in towing them into the Chesapeake.