The jails in most South American towns are generally of the least wholesome sort.  Built of huge cakes of sun-burnt brick, and containing but one room, without windows or yard, and but one door heavily grated with wooden bars, they present both within and without the grimmest aspect.  As public edifices they conspicuously stand upon the hot and dusty Plaza, offering to view, through the gratings, their villainous and hopeless inmates, burrowing in all sorts of tragic squalor.  And here, for a long time, Oberlus was seen; the central figure of a mongrel and assassin band; a creature whom it is religion to detest, since it is philanthropy to hate a misanthrope.

Note.—­They who may be disposed to question the possibility of the character above depicted, are referred to the 2d vol. of Porter’s Voyage into the Pacific, where they will recognize many sentences, for expedition’s sake derived verbatim from thence, and incorporated here; the main difference—­save a few passing reflections—­between the two accounts being, that the present writer has added to Porter’s facts accessory ones picked up in the Pacific from reliable sources; and where facts conflict, has naturally preferred his own authorities to Porter’s.  As, for instance, his authorities place Oberlus on Hood’s Isle:  Porter’s, on Charles’s Isle.  The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different; for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which does not adequately appear in Porter’s version.  I accordingly altered it to suit the general character of its author.

* * * * *

SKETCH TENTH.

RUNAWAYS, CASTAWAYS, SOLITARIES, GRAVE-STONES, ETC.

  “And all about old stocks and stubs of trees,
    Whereon nor fruit nor leaf was ever seen,
  Did hang upon ragged knotty knees,
    On which had many wretches hanged been.”

Some relics of the hut of Oberlus partially remain to this day at the head of the clinkered valley.  Nor does the stranger, wandering among other of the Enchanted Isles, fail to stumble upon still other solitary abodes, long abandoned to the tortoise and the lizard.  Probably few parts of earth have, in modern times, sheltered so many solitaries.  The reason is, that these isles are situated in a distant sea, and the vessels which occasionally visit them are mostly all whalers, or ships bound on dreary and protracted voyages, exempting them in a good degree from both the oversight and the memory of human law.  Such is the character of some commanders and some seamen, that under these untoward circumstances, it is quite impossible but that scenes of unpleasantness and discord should occur between them.  A sullen hatred of the tyrannic ship will seize the sailor, and he gladly exchanges it for isles, which, though blighted as by a continual sirocco and burning breeze, still offer