The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his
wife. For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together.
When I think of the husband's manly care in thus abiding by the wife,
I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only valued his
life and hers at a few dollars--not enough to compensate the traveler
for the loss incurred as demurrage to the fishermen.

Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling
fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is
as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the
cataclysm of that dreadful night--bones which now waste to whiteness
on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the under-sea.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

[Footnote 1: The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description
is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate
chromoscope. I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the
intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the
naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the
former surpassing the idealization of the latter.]

[Footnote 2: By recent provision the Chinese are
allowed to buy foreign vessels.]




POSEY'S NUGGET.