heard of the priest and Matura, it was thought the sea had swallowed them up, when they were discovered on this lonely island by some Spanish adventurers from a neighboring coast.  The priest at once gave the visitors an account of how the island rose from the ocean by special providence for his protection, together with a minute description of all that had taken place since their banishment.  He had chanted vespers regularly three times a day, while Matura had confessed to him, sang to him, and made him garments of the feathers of birds, the flesh of which furnished them with food.  What seemed most singular, was that although their locks were whitened with the cares of fourscore years, both stood ready to swear before an inquisition of saints that neither in thought nor deed had they sinned against the commandments.

“Meanwhile the servant, instrumental in procuring the banishment of the priest and Matura, was brought to his death-bed, and as he was troubled about leaving this world with so deep a crime in his heart, he came out and declared that the charge he had brought against the priest and Matura was a tissue of lies which he had been bribed to promulgate by another priest, to whom he was in the habit of confessing.  But the innocence thus revealed was of no avail; for the priest and Matura died on the island, and there was an end of it as far as that went.

“The Spaniards returned and reported the discovery to their people, as also the story of the priest and Matura.  Whereupon the Spaniards laid claims to Spark Island, they being, as they asserted, the first discoverers.  But the story, together with the discovery, was not long in coursing down the coast to the ears of the Kaloramas, who immediately fitted out a fleet of seven canoes, and dispatched them in charge of twenty stalwarth natives and a priest, who had taken high orders, such an one being held necessary to the safety of the expedition.  Well, they descried the island, and having landed, found the bones of the priest and Matura in a cave, on the side of a steep bluff.  And when these were brought home, the people of Kalorama went into deep mourning, and had them buried with great ceremony in a grove of cocoanut trees, where all girls of tender years were taught to go at early morning and lay offerings of flowers upon the grave of Matura the innocent.

“But there soon sprung up a great dispute as to the possession of this island.  The Spaniards claimed it in virtue of their discovery, while the Kaloramas, with no less plausibility, asserted a priority by virtue of its having been first inhabited by the priest and Matura, whom they claimed as citizens of Kalorama.  And, notwithstanding a manuscript written by the priest while in his lonely exile, and describing how an All-wise Providence had created this island solely for his preservation, was by an intriguing Spaniard placed in the hands of the King of the Kaloramas as proof against his own countrymen, the question