“Coward,” muttered the little wasp, “you are afraid, sir;” and the other boys abetting the mischief-maker, the lad was goaded to leave his hold of the cable, and strike out for the buoy.  He reached it, and then turned, and pulled towards the ship again, when he caught my eye.

“Who is that overboard?  How dare you, sir, disobey the standing order of the ship?  Come in, boy; come in.”

My hailing the little fellow shoved him off his balance, and he lost his presence of mind for a moment or two, during which he, if any thing, widened his distance from the ship.

At this instant the lad on the spritsail-yard sung out quick and suddenly, “A shark, a shark!”

And the monster, like a silver pillar, suddenly shot up perpendicularly from out the dark green depths of the sleeping pool, with the waters sparkling and hissing around him, as if he had been a sea-demon rushing on his prey.

“Pull for the cable, Louis,” shouted fifty voices at once—­“pull for the cable.”

The boy did so—­we all ran forward.  He reached the cable—­grasped it with both hands, and hung on, but before he could swing himself out of the water, the fierce fish had turned.  His whitish-green belly glanced in the sun—­the poor little fellow gave a heart-splitting yell, which was shattered amongst the impending rocks into piercing echoes, and these again were reverberated from cavern to cavern, until they died away amongst the hollows in the distance, as if they had been the faint shrieks of the damned—­yet he held fast for a second or two—­the ravenous tyrant of the sea tug, tugging at him, till the stiff, taught cable shook again.  At length he was torn from his hold, but did not disappear; the animal continuing on the surface crunching his prey with his teeth, and digging at him with his jaws, as if trying to gorge a morsel too large to be swallowed, and making the water flash up in foam over the boats in pursuit, by the powerful strokes of his tail, but without ever letting go his hold.  The poor lad only cried once more—­but such a cry—­oh, God, I never shall forget it!—­and, could it be possible, in his last shriek, his piercing expiring cry, his young voice seemed to pronounce my name—­at least so I thought at the time, and others thought so too.  The next moment he appeared quite dead.  No less than three boats had been in the water alongside when the accident happend, and they were all on the spot by this time.  And there was the bleeding and mangled boy, torn along the surface of the water by the shark, with the boats in pursuit, leaving a long stream of blood, mottled with white specks of fat and marrow in his wake.  At length the man in the bow of the gig laid hold of him by the arm, another sailor caught the other arm, boat-hooks and oars were dug into and launched at the monster, who relinquished his prey at last, stripping off the flesh, however, from the upper part of the right thigh, until his teeth reached the knee, where he nipped the shank clean off, and made sail with the leg in his jaws.  Poor little Louis never once moved after we took him in.—­I thought I heard a small, still, stern voice thrill along my nerves, as if an echo of the beating of my heart had become articulate.  “Thomas, a fortnight ago, you impressed that poor boy, who was, and now is not, out of a Bristol ship.”  Alas, conscience spoke no more than the truth.