The subject was discussed on the passage, the plan arranged, and the unsuspecting officers, passengers, and two lads, apprentices to the captain, murdered and thrown overboard. My readers would be, perhaps, but little edified by a more circumstantial narrative. There is so little variation in the details of shipwreck, acts of piracy, obituary notices, ordinations, commencements, murders, suicides, mammoth turnips, and Fourth of July celebrations, that printers would find it a great saving of time, money, and labor, to have regular and approved forms of each stereotyped, with blank spaces for names and dates.
This bloody deed was executed near the southern extremity of the then half province and half republic of Chili; and the murderers, with considerable difficulty, succeeded in running the ship between the island of Santa Marie and the main, and anchoring near the town or city of Aranco, which was then in the hands of Benavidas, above mentioned.
This sanguinary freebooter was then, under the auspices and with the assistance of the equally sanguinary royal governor of Chili, Sanchez, carrying on a most horrid and cruel war of extermination against the republican inhabitants of the southern part of Chili. Into the hands of this murderous ruffian and his ragamuffin gang the Swan was delivered; but the villany of her piratical crew was soon to receive its just punishment. Benavidas, who suspected them of having kept back no trifling part of the plunder, with very little privacy and no formality, shot them all but Longford, whom, for some unaccountable reason or other, he spared.
_Orlando._ Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind.
_Jaques._ Nay then, God be wi' you an you talk in blank verse.
Our scene must now change somewhat abruptly from the shores of the Pacific to a very different part of this watery ball.
Great and manifold are the advantages that an author enjoys over his readers; for, however anxious those readers may be to arrive at the end of the story, they must either close the book with a "Pish!" or a "Pshaw!" or condescend to follow him, and resignedly await his leisure. He leads them where he pleases and at what pace he pleases; they must follow him: they are like passengers on board a packet beating into port with what sailors call "a good working breeze;" at one moment they seem to have almost reached the anchorage, when suddenly the skipper shouts "Helm's a-lee," the vessel heaves in stays and makes a long "stretch" off, till the spires and roofs of the wished-for haven seem fading away in the hazy distance.