an hour, lieutenant colonel Thornicroft desired him to remove, as he was unable to do any service; he and colonel Sibourg answered that no danger was to be apprehended there, more than in any other place, and they would wait the event. The lieutenant colonel, with other officers, imitated their example. When the hour of five was considerably past, the corporal's guard, observing some smoke from the lighted matches, cried out that the train was fired. The governor and field officers were then urged to retreat, but still refused.

The mine at last blew up; the rock opened and shut; the whole mountain felt the convulsion; the governor and field officers, with their company, ten guns, and two mortars, were buried in the abyss; the walls of the castle shook, part of the great cistern fell, another cistern almost closed, and the rock shut a man almost up to his neck in its cliff, who lived many hours in that afflicting posture. About thirty-six sentinels and women were swallowed up in different quarters, whose dying groans were heard, even after the fourth mournful day. Many houses of the town were overwhelmed in the ruins, and the castle suffered much; but that it wears any form at all, was owing to the vent which the explosion forced through the veins of the rock, and the countermine. After the loss of the chief officers, the government fell to lieutenant colonel D'Albon, of Sibourg's regiment, who with a detachment from the garrison, made a desperate sally, to show how little he was moved at their thunder. The bombs from the castle played on the town more violently, and the shot galled every corner of the streets; these marks of their resentment they continued till the arrival of our fleet, which they nad expected so long, and which giving them relief, compelled the French to raise the siege.

OVERLAND JOURNEY TO INDIA.

MR. BARTON, an English gentleman, had acquired a nandsome fortune in the East Indies, with which he returned to England, settled at some distance from London,

in the character of a country gentleman, and served the office of high sheriff for the county in which he lived. Being necessitated however to return to India to settle some affairs, he had the courage to fit out a small Folkstone cutter, in which he actually set sail from England for the East Indies; but, before he had been many days at sea, she was (luckily perhaps for himself and his little crew) taken by a French privateer and carried into Vigo. From hence he got a passage to Leghorn, taking his son with him, who had also embarked in the same dangerous enterprise for the East Indies. At Leghorn they took ship again, and got safe to Scanderoon. Here he was so impatient to get forward on his journey, that he would not wait for the caravan, but set out for Aleppo, attended only by his son, a country servant, and a few camels. His spirit was too active to endure the slow march of these animals; he therefore frequently made excursions on foot before them, but one day, while alone, he was attacked by a few Arabs, who robbed him of every thing he had about him. He however arrived at Aleppo without any other accident. Here he was in the same hurry for proceeding on his journey, nor would he wait two or three weeks for the setting out of a large caravan for Bagdad and Bassora.

He accordingly began this second hazardous expedition with only two or three camels, and the same country servant, leaving his son behind at Aleppo, with orders to follow him by the first convenient opportunity. For a few days he and his man went on uninterrupted over the desert. At length five or six hundred Arabs discovered them; but, upon their coming nigh, Mr. Barton drew out a brace of pistols which he carried in his belt, and presented them at the Arabs. Astonished at his rashness, they made a stand, but at the same time ordered him to lay down his arms. His servant also persuaded him to comply, but all in vain; he still held his cocked pistols towards the Arabs, and with a determined look, and hightoned voice, declared he would kill some of them, if they dared to approach any nearer. By degrees they surrounded him, and, with a blow on the head, he was brought to the ground, and his pistols taken from him. The Arabs now in their turn presented these weapons to

his breast, and told him he deserved to be put to death; but they satisfied themselves with stripping him quite naked, and leaving the servant a jacket and breeches, but not a drop of water, or morsel of provisions for either.

Mr. Barton, after the enemy rode off, accepted the breeches which his servant offered to him, and they both set off bare-footed (their camels also having been taken from them) in the track of Bagdad. After having passed two days and nights without meeting with any other support than the truffles of the desert, that happened then to be in season, and which they found in great plenty, they fortunately fell in with another tribe of Arabs, to whose Sheick they told their melancholy tale, and implored his assistance. The Sheick was touched with the relation of their distress, and afforded them every help in his power; his own wives ministered unto them, anointing their feet; and brought them milk, with every other necessary. As soon as they were sufficiently recovered to set forward, the son of the Sheick escorted them so far as to put them under the protection of another Sheick, by whom they were entertained in the like hospitable manner, and dismissed with other guards and passports; nor did they want friends as long as their journey lasted, each tribe seeing them safely lodged with its next neighbor, until they had delivered them into the hands of our countrymen at Bagdad.—Ive's Journal of a Voyage to India.

ESCAPE FROM PIRATES.

THE morning broke hazily upon the Atlantic, with a fresh breeze from the eastward, attended by frequent squalls of light rain. The sea had assumed that dead, lead color, which always attests the absence of the sun; and a dark curtain of clouds, that were slowly heaving up to windward, threatened an interval of heavier wea

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ther before the close of the day. About a hundred miles from that part of the coast of South America, situated between the Brazil shoals and Cape Frio, a large and beautiful ship was dashing along under a press of canvass. She had the wind abeam, and every thing that the weather would allow was packed on alow and aloft. On her quarter deck, a group, consisting of the passengers and officers of the ship, had collected to observe a strange sail, which, since daylight, had been discovered two or three points forward of the beam.

"Give me the glass," said a stout, good-looking, middle-aged man, whose countenance betrayed, or more properly indicated, a fondness for glasses, and whose authoritative tone at once christened him skipper. Taking the proffered instrument, he adjusted it at the proper focus, and commenced studying the stranger, whose hull, by the aid of the telescope, was but just visible, as she rose upon the crest of the waves.

"He's edging away for us," muttered Captain Bangem; "just got a pull of his weather braces; a suspicious looking craft, too."

"A guineaman, from the coast, perhaps," said Skysail. "The fellow thinks it's getting too black to windward for all his duck," resumed the captain; "he's reefing his foretop-sail, and we must follow suit."

Passing the glass to a sailor at his elbow, he took up the trumpet, and looking at the mouth-piece for a moment, applied it to his lips, and gave the order to take in the studding-sails, royals, and flying-jib. When this movement had been executed, Bangem again thundered forth:

"Man the top-gallant clew-lines-clear away the sheets -clew up-man the top-sail reef-tackles and buntlinesclear away the bowlines-round in the braces-settle away the halliards-clew down, haul out the reef-tackles, and up the buntlines-trice up the booms-lay out, and take in the second reef!"

The ever-ready seamen sprang upon the yards, and extending themselves along either extremity, caught up and secured to the spar the canvass contained between

the first and second reef-bands. When all three of the top-sails had been reefed, the yards were again mastheaded and trimmed, the top-gallant-sails sheeted home, and the Niagara once more freshened her speed through the water.

In the mean time, the stranger was fast coming down, and so rapidly had he overhauled the Niagara, that those on board of the latter were able to distinguish her build and rig, with the naked eye. She was a long, low, clipperschooner, with spars that seemed much too taut and square for the little hull out of which they rose. Captain Bangem had been watching her for some moments, with the utmost interest, when, turning to Skysail, he ordered him to hoist the ensign. "Now," said he, "we'll see what bunting the fellow wears. Ah, there it goes! the stars and stripes." A rolling billow of smoke rose from the bow of the schooner, and the report of a gun thundered along the breeze.

"Man the weather main-braces-clear away the bowlines-put the helm down-ease off the jib-sheet!" shouted Bangem; and, in another moment, the Niagara was lying to with the main-topsail to the mast. The skipper again resumed the spy-glass; but scarcely had he raised it to his eye, when, relinquishing it to another, he seized the trumpet, and, in a voice that betrayed unusual excitement, he sang out, "Haul aft the jib-sheet !-hard up, hard up!"

"Hard up!" answered the man at the wheel, and the obedient ship fell rapidly off before the wind.

Lay aft the braces," said Bangem; "meet her now, boy."

"She's got the lee helm," was the immediate reply. "Steady as you go-steady, so."

"Steady so, sir," responded the steersman.

The sullen report of a gun told how the stranger had received this manœuvre : and when the smoke rolled off to the leeward, the American ensign was no longer at his peak. Before the Niagara had been kept away, she was running along with the wind abeam; the stranger was on her weather-bow, and heading so as to near