where Robin, meanwhile, had been recovering his breath and his courage.

"He was a stout, sinewy, middle-aged man, dressed like a sailor, with a tarpaulin knapsack on his back, a new blue cloth jacket, and old canvass trowsers, exceedingly well daubed with pitch, and no hat or cap, that covering having been lost in the scuffle. He had a most savage countenance, covered with whiskers, beard, and hair, all black and grizzled, with a swarthy skin, that was now, owing to faintness and loss of blood, of a cadaverous leaden color; and there were drops of blood on his forehead, coming from some wound on the head, and a more plentiful besprinkling on his shirt, that added to the grimness and ferocity of his appearance.

"The roughness with which he had been dragged from the road had stirred up the latent powers of life; and he was beginning to rouse from his insensibility, as the wagoners brought him into the room, vociferating a thousand triumphant encomiums upon their own courage, and as many felicitations upon the prospect they thought they had, both of being rewarded by the Governor of the State for apprehending such a desperate villain, and of seeing him hanged into the bargain. Being in such a happy mood, they agreed with great generosity to treat their prisoner to a glass of grog, with a view of enlivening his spirits and recalling his wits; and this, being accordingly presented, and immediately swallowed with great eagerness, had the good effect of restoring him at once to his faculties. This he made apparent by suddenly bending an eye of indignant inquiry on his captors, who held him fast by the collar, and by exclaiming, in corresponding tones, Sink my timbers, shipmates! do you intend to murder, as well as rob me?'

"This address, which filled them with surprise, the wagoners answered by telling him, they were no robbers, but he was, as he should find to his cost; a charge that, to my amazement, the honest man, instead of admitting in full, repelled with furious indignation, swearing that, instead of being a robber, he had himself just been robbed by a brace of rascally land-rats on the road under their noses,— plundered of a huge store of prize-money, the gains of a whole year of fighting, which he was carrying to his wife and children in Philadelphia, and knocked on the head into the bargain; that he would have the blood of the villains, whom he could swear to, and would pursue to the ends of the earth; and if they, the wagoners, were honest fellows, and loved a sailor that had been fighting their battles on the stormy seas, they would help VOL. XLIX. - No. 104.

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him to catch the rascals, instead of jawing him like a thief and a pirate, they would, split him.

"This address, delivered with matchless effrontery, and with an air of injured and insulted innocence quite indescribable, had the effect of staggering several of the captors, who evidently began to think they had made a mistake; while others laughed it to scorn; and one of them called me forward (for I had kept, from modesty and fear, in the background) to confront the fellow; which I did, though with no good heart, having a great dread of his ferocious looks. But, however terrible the robber appeared in my eyes, I, it seems, possessed an appearance equally alarming in his; for no sooner had he caught sight of me, than he roared out, 'That 's one of the land-sharks, sink me!' and starting back, with the air of one endeavouring to overcome a fit of trepidation, called upon some of the company to give him a pistol or cutlass, and upon the others to hold the villain fast, for he could swear his life against me.'

"I was confounded at this sally; and, as the sailor had every appearance of being in earnest, and the wagoners looked as if vastly inclined to believe his story, I began to have my doubts whether I was not a robber in reality. To complete my confusion, the innkeeper now swore he had had his suspicions of me from the first,' and said, I ought to be searched for the sailor's money. A furious contention arose among the wagoners, some insisting that I was, others that I was not, the robber; the former arguing my innocence from the fact of my coming of my own accord into their camp; while the others, among whom was the man upon whose back I had been pitched, declared the visit was not voluntary, but that I had been thrown among them by my horse, entirely against my will, and had invented the story of my having been robbed, only to prevent their arresting me as the robber.

"And during all this time, the real Simon Pure, the highwayman himself, kept up a terrible din, calling me a thief and pirate, demanding a weapon, insisting that the wagoners should hold me fast; and, in the midst of all his rage, discovering so much disinclination to come within arm's length of me, who was, on my part, ready to swoon with dismay, that some of the company were scandalized at his cowardice; which was the more remarkable in one of his age and warlike profession, and assured him 'the little boy,' as they contemptuously termed me,' would not eat him.'

"Encouraged, or pretending to be encouraged, by this assurance, (for the crafty knave was merely playing a part,) he threw aside his fear, seized me by the collar, and gave me a

furious shaking, overwhelming me with denunciations and maledictions; and the others of the company, moved by the same imitative impulse, which, when one dog of a village attacks a currish visitant, leads all the other dogs of the town to set upon the stranger, in like manner, fell upon me likewise ; so that I thought I should have been shaken to death among them.

"It was in vain I remonstrated, and protested my own innocence and the guilt of the sailor. The latter worthy grew more furious and determined every moment; and, finding that I had a horse at the door, he carried his audacity to the pitch of claiming him as his own, or rather as his captain's, which, he said, he was carrying to Philadelphia for his commander; swore I had knocked him off that very beast's back, and then run off with him; and ended by jumping upon Bay Tom's back, and riding immediately off, for the purpose, as he said, of hunting up my accomplice, the other villain,' who had made off with his prize-money; in which undertaking he invited the assistance of the wagoners, promising a handsome reward to any who should help him to a sight of the pirate. This induced two or three of them to mount their horses; and I had the satisfaction of seeing the scoundrel, whose unparalleled impudence had thus carried him through, gallop away with my patron's horse, leaving me a prisoner in his place."Vol. 1. pp. 109-113.

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The reader has here his first taste of the quality of the pirate Captain Brown, who exercises the most sinister influence on our hero's fortunes through the whole of the tale. Robin drops from the window of a garret, where it was arranged to confine him till there should be an opportunity to deliver him up to justice, and makes his way on foot to Philadelphia, from the sharpers of which city, its negroes, and, above all, its wits, he suffers multitudinous annoyance. To the last class belonged a tobacconist, whose shop he visited to provide himself with the means of protection against the second, who would give him no room upon the sidewalks.

'Upon my demanding if he had any very strong snuff, he replied, with a grin, 'he had some so strong the box wouldn't hold it; and, when I told him of my mishap with the pottery, he declared, that that was only a way of taking pot-luck uninvited.' He consoled me for the imposition practised upon me with the four notes, by saying that,' whatever we might think of them, they were undoubtedly counterfeit,which he supposed, in plain English, meant fit for the coun

ter.' In short, this happy personage astounded me by a multitude of quibbles, which he produced as a hen does her eggs, with a furious cackle after each; and then dismissed me with my box of snuff, which, its violence setting me sneezing as I left the door, he declared was, nevertheless, 'not to be sneezed at.'" Vol. 1. p. 126.

Going in search of Mr. Bloodmoney, to whom his patron had furnished him with a letter, intended to procure him an opportunity of going to sea, he falls in with a person, who in reply to his request to be directed to Mr. Bloodmoney's house, assumes that gentleman's name, and helps himself to the letter, and to its contents of bank notes. This is no other than a second appearance of Captain Brown. Brown, personating Bloodmoney, guides Robin late at night to the latter's house, which they enter together by means of a key, produced by Brown, he enjoining silence upon Robin, that they may not disturb his invalid wife.

Robin, in short, begins his career of city life by being unintentionally a burglar. No harm, however, comes of the adventure at present, to either of the parties. Each makes an escape on his own account, Robin charging himself to take a lesson from his grievous mishap, and be very circumspect about trusting fair-seeming men again. His "vaulting ambition" of prudence for this time "o'erleaps its sell." He is overtaken by John Dabs, the constable of Dr. Howard's town, who, by reason of his skill in finding the track of people who would rather not be followed, has been sent after him by that gentleman, to inform him, that M'Goggin's life is in no danger, and invite him to return home. Satisfied that Dabs has but come to inveigle him by this story into the hands of justice, he uses vast address to put that officer off his guard, and, getting out of his way on the first opportunity, congratulates himself past measure on this achievement of his dear-bought sagacity.

Full of patriotism and valor, Robin Day repairs to the neighbourhood of the Chesapeake, it was at the time of the prodigious exploits of Admiral Cockburn, in that bay, in the last war, and, falling in with a military party, in motion for an engagement, promptly volunteers, not finding out, till he is already in action, that he has enlisted on the wrong side. He is conveyed on board a vessel of the British fleet, and, liking better to be still a volunteer than a prisoner of war,

takes up

with the former character till he shall find an opportunity to escape. At Havre de Grace, in a spasmodic endeavour to run away, he gets the credit of fighting with desperate bravery. At Craney Island he has better luck, so far as to reestablish himself upon American ground, though at the risk, when recognised, of being tried by a court-martial for treason; a désagrément, from which he is only saved by the interposition of his old friend, Captain Dare, who turns out to be one of the heroes of that well-fought day, and who dismisses him in safety, but with a volley of contumelious reproaches, of the most patriotic description.

A third time a fugitive for unintended felony, Robin Day is accosted in the woods by Captain Brown. Misfortune, which "makes strange bed-fellows," makes equally strange travelling companions. They set out together on their forlorn pilgrimage; and Robin, before he knows what he has undertaken for, finds himself concerned with Brown in the itinerant practice of the healing art, a new style of the médecin malgré lui, he, in the character of an East Indian conjuror, prescribing medicines which Brown administers. The adventure ends by his being sold, under his Indian disguise of a dark complexion, to a Virginia planter, who pays Brown an enormous price for him, in consideration of his marvellous skill.

From this difficulty, and various others beyond, the author successfully extricates him. Those who would see how he does it, we must refer to the volumes themselves, which, we repeat, they will find spirited and amusing in no common degree. The story of the "Bloody Volunteers" of Tennessee, to the command of whom Captain Dare advances himself by force of his military virtues, is told with genuine humor, and the conception of incidents at sea, towards the close of the story, is marked with power of a different and higher kind.