own safety as well as your convenience." Frere scowled, and, stepping awkwardly into the jolly-boat, fell. Pinioned as he was, he could not rise without assistance, and Russen pulled him roughly to his feet, with a coarse laugh. In his present frame of mind, that laugh galled him worse than his bonds.

Poor Mrs. Vickers, with a woman's quick instinct, saw this, and, even amid her own trouble, found leisure to console. "The wretches!" she said, under her breath, as Frere was flung down beside her, "to subject you to such indignity!" Sylvia said nothing, and seemed to shrink from the lieutenant. Perhaps in her childish fancy, she had pictured him as coming to her rescue, armed cap-a-pie, and clad in dazzling mail, or, at the very least, as a muscular hero, who should settle affairs out of hand by sheer personal prowess. If she had entertained any such notion, the reality must have struck coldly upon her senses. Mr. Frere, purple, clumsy, and bound, was not at all heroic.

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Now, my lads," says Rex-who seemed to have endued the cast-off authority of Frere -" we give you your choice. Stay at Hell's Gates, or come with us!"

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The soldiers paused, irresolute. To join

VOL. I.

18

the mutineers meant a certainty of hard work, with a chance of ultimate hanging. Yet to stay with the prisoners was-as far as they could see-to incur the inevitable fate of starvation on a barren coast. As is often the case on such occasions, a trifle sufficed to turn the scale. The wounded Grimes, who was slowly recovering from his stupor, dimly caught the meaning of the sentence, and in his obfuscated condition of intellect, must needs make comment upon it. "Go with him, ye beggars!" said he, "and leave us honest men! Oh, ye'll get a tying-up for this!"

The phrase "tying-up" brought with it recollection of the worst portion of military discipline, the cat, and revived in the minds of the pair already disposed to break the yoke that sat so heavily upon them, a train of dismal memories. The life of a soldier on a convict station was at that time a hard one. He was often stinted in rations, and of necessity deprived of all rational recreation, while punishment for offences was prompt and severe. The companies drafted to the penal settlements were not composed of the best material, and the pair had good precedent for the course they were about to take.

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Come," says Rex, "I can't wait here all

night. The wind is freshening, and we must make the Bar. Which is it to be?"

"We'll go with you!" says the man who had pulled stroke in the whaleboat, spitting into the water with averted face. Upon which utterance the convicts burst into joyous oaths, and the pair were received with much handshaking.

Then Rex, with Lyon and Riley as a guard, got into the whale-boat, and having loosed the two prisoners from their bonds, ordered them to take the places of Russen and Fair. The whale-boat was manned by the seven mutineers, Rex steering, Fair, Russen, and the two recruits pulling, and the other four standing up, with their muskets levelled at the jolly-boat. Their long slavery had begotten such a dread of authority in these men, that they feared it even when it was bound and menaced by four muskets. Keep your distance!" shouted Cheshire, as Frere and Bates, in obedience to orders, began to pull the jollyboat toward the shore; and in this fashion was the dismal little party conveyed to the mainland.

It was night when they reached it, but the clear sky began to thrill with a late moon as yet unarisen, and the waves, breaking gently

HERE is no need to dwell upon the mental agonies of that miserable night. Perhaps, of all the five, the one least qualified to endure it realized the prospect of suffering most acutely. Mrs. Vickers-lay-figure and noodle as she was had the keen instinct of approaching danger, which is in her sex a sixth sense. She was a woman and a mother, and owned to a double capacity for suffering. Her feminine imagination pictured all the horrors of death by famine, and having realized her own torments, her maternal love forced her to live them over again in the person of her child. Rejecting Bates's offer of a