Page:Demon ship, or, The pirate of the Mediterranean.pdf/6

6 to the whimsies of twenty-five; so I stood to my bargain, determined to keep myself as much as possible from the knowledge of my old tormentor. Conscious of my altered personal appearance, I resolved to travel charmingly incog., and assumed thcthe [sic] name and title of Captain Lyon, which had been familiar to me in my childhood, as belonging to a friend of Captain Cameron.

It was the month of June, and the weather was oppressively hot. There was so little wind stirring after we set sail, that for several days we made scarcely any way under all the sail we could carry. The first night I stretched my limbs on a long seat which joined the steps of the quarter-deck. I was now then really on my way to my native shores, and should not step from the vessel in which I sailed until I trode thothe [sic] land of my fathers! Naturally enough, my thoughts turned to formcrformer [sic] days and old faces. From time to time, there thoughts half sunk into dreams, from which I repeatedly awoke, and as often dozed off again. At length, my memory, and consequently my dreams, took the shapcshape [sic] of Margaret Cameron. The joyous laugh of youth seemed to ring in my ears; and when I closed my eyes, her lovely bright countenance instantly rose beforobefore [sic] them. Yet I had the inconsistcntinconsistent [sic] conviction of a dreamer that she was dead, and as my slumber deepened, I seemed busied in a pilgrimage to her early grave. I saw the church-yard of A———, with the yellow sunlight streaming on many a green hillock; and there was one solitary grass grave, that, as if by a strange spell, drew my steps, and on an humble head-stone I read the name of 'Margaret Cameron, aged 18.' To my unspeakable emotion I heard, beneath the sods, a sound of sweet and soothing, but melancholy music. While I listened with an attention that apparently deprived my senses of their power, the churohchurch [sic]-yard and grave disappeared, and I seemed, by one of those transitions to which the dreamer is so subject, to be sailing on a lone and dismal sea, whose leaden and melancholy waves reflected no sail save that of the vessclvessel [sic] which borobore [sic] me. The heat became stifling, and my bosom oppressed, yet the music still sounded, low, sweet, and foreboding in my ear. A soft and whitish mist seemed to brood over the stern of thcthe [sic] ship. According to the apparently established laws of spiritual matter, the mist condensed, then gradually assumed form, and I gazed, with outstretched arms, on the figure of Margaret Cameron. She seemed in my vision as one who, in quitting earth, had left not only its passions but its affections behind her; and there was somothingsomething [sic] forbidding in the wan indifference of that eye. Yet was her voice passing sweet, as still its sad cadences fell