yet mused on the manner in which he was to pass the hours till morning, his olfactory nerves became sensible of a smell of fire,-the smoke of burning wood, which evidently came from the interior of the cave; and hastily concluding it to be owing to one of the wandering fires he had seen abroad, he explored his way through the cavern towards the smell, expecting to find an outlet on the other side of the mountain, through which he calculated the smoke was driven perhaps from a distance. The odour and its vapour increased as he proceeded; and he had not made a very long or very painful march, before he began to perceive a glimmering of light, by which he attained an inner apartment as it were of the cave, filled it is true with smoke, but in some measure illuminated by the fire from which it exhaled; not one of the wandering fires of the wilderness, but a fire of burning brands laid on the floor of the apartment too evidently by human hands. "This," thought he, "is at least the abode of man: runaway slave, Maroon, or robber, I will yet claim his hospitality; my situation cannot be worse, and what have I to lose? But where is the tenant of the dwelling? Here are plantains too, not long roasted, and rum; and what are these?" he added, taking up some garments that lay on the floor, a contoo, and an instrument of music, a bonjaw. "Let us at least summon the master of the cave. What ho! hilloh!"

VOL. 1.

C

The voice died away unheeded, and the traveller listened to its echoes until he felt almost afraid and ashamed to disturb the silence again. Yet he mustered courage to exert his voice a second and a third time, though as at first ineffectually. Sufficiently removed from the storm without, to hear no more of it than an occasional murmur which stole along the vault he had penetrated, too faint to cause him any farther concern, his own voice was reverberated on his ears with a force from which he shrank within himself, so painful was it to his oppressed and agitated

nerves.

He called no more; but conforming himself with a philosophical moderation to the hour and the scene in which he found himself, he trimmed the fire; took off his wet clothes, which he wrung and disposed around it; attired himself in the contoo of his invisible host; and wrapping his feet in a blanket which lay beside it, helped himself from the calabash of rum, and put some of the plantains on the fire again to warm. He had seated himself on a bundle of sticks, and as he took a second taste of the rum calabash, surveyed at his leisure, by the cheerful blaze he had made, the extent and furniture of his apartment.

It was a lofty cavern hewn by the hand of nature in the otherwise solid lime-stone rock, from the roof of which hung many stalactites, whose points were blackened by the smoke from the fire

beneath. Besides the opening by which the traveller had entered, there were four other apertures, each leading, as it seemed from the glimpse he had taken of them, to other recesses in the rock, and so much resembling each other that he could not now distinctly ascertain that which had admitted him. Alarmed for a moment at this discovery, he arose from his seat, and taking a firebrand from the blazing pile, would fain have explored these vomitories, into each of which he walked a few paces, without however deriving the information he required, or gaining any but a conviction that they extended farther than he was disposed at present to penetrate. He next surveyed the precincts of the cave itself, and its rather curious contents. In a recess stood a couple of spears, one solely of hard wood, whose point was rendered still harder by fire; the other was shod with iron and rusted apparently with blood; a bamboo rod, ten feet in length and about an inch in thickness, leaned against the rock beside them, carved or tattoed from end to end. In another angle of the vault was a calabash filled with various sorts of hair, among which it was easy to discriminate that of white men, horses, and dogs. These were huddled together, and crowded with feathers of various birds, especially those of domestic poultry and wild parrots, with one or two of the spoils of a macaw. A human skull

was placed beside this calabash, from which the teeth were missing; but on turning it up, the traveller found them with a quantity of broken glass crammed into the cerebellum, and covered up with a wad of silk cotton, to prevent them from falling out. There were several other skulls in a second recess, some perfect, some which had been broken apparently with a sharp pointed instrument, and many of them serving as calabashes or boxes to hold the strange property of the master of the cave; one was a receptacle for gunpowder, which the inquisitive traveller narrowly escaped inflaming; a second contained bullets and shot of various sizes, mixed with old nails and pieces of rag; and from a third he saw with no little horror a black snake uncoil itself the moment he touched it. There were three muskets, all old and out of order; a pistol and two cutlasses, disposed on different ledges of the rock; a large conch-shell fitted with a belt of mahoe bark, to be worn over the shoulder, hung from a projection, with several other pieces of rope made of similar materials, to which were attached rings of wood and hollowed stones, perhaps intended for amulets or charms. A lamp of clay at last arrested his attention; it had carved on it some rude figures, and was filled with oil of the Palma Christi, having a wick formed of the fibres of the plantain stalk. This the intruder took the liberty of illuming, to assist

him more conveniently than did his flickering firebrand in the farther search he seemed disposed to prosecute. By the help of this he espied a pair of shoepatters, a sort of coarse sandal, and a red cloak resembling the South-American poncho. Some salted fish was suspended from a part of the roof, with a large calabash of sugar, and another of coarse salt; and an earthen jar contained no no small store of salted pork. There were several pieces of jerked hog hanging from a stick placed across this recess, to one of which he helped himself without ceremony; and thinking he had made sufficient search for the present, returned to the fire, on which he heaped fresh fuel, raking forward the embers to cook his meat: placed his lamp on a shelf of the rock full in his view; and taking a gombah for his stool, sat down very deliberately to his supper. He ate with no sparing appetite; and the rum which he quaffed as his thirst prompted him, refreshed his body and composed his mind so happily and so gradually, that what with that and his fatigue, the solace of the fire and the fumes of his digestion, he at last slipt gently from his gombah, which now served him for a pillow, rolled himself up in his blanket, and fell into a profound sleep.