Ready's voice became faint after this exertion of speaking so much.

He motioned to William, who immediately climbed up the cocoanut tree, and waited there till daylight.

At dawn of day, he perceived that the savages were at work, that they had collected all the fagots together opposite to where the old house stood, and were very busy in making arrangements for the attack. At last he perceived that they every one shouldered a fagot, and commenced their advance toward the stockade; William immediately descended from the tree, and called his father, who was talking with Mrs. Seagrave. The muskets were all loaded, and Mrs. Seagrave and Juno took their posts below the planking, to reload them as fast as they were fired.

"We must fire upon them as soon as we are sure of not missing them, William," said Mr. Seagrave, "for the more we check their advance the better."

When the first savages were within fifty yards, they both fired, and two of the men dropped; and they continued to fire as their assailants came up, with great success for the first ten minutes; after which the savages advanced in a larger body, and took the precaution to hold the fagots in front of them, for some protection as they approached. By these means they gained the stockade in safety, and commenced laying their fagots. Mr. Seagrave and William still kept up an incessant fire upon them, but not with so much success as before.

Although many fell, the fagots were gradually heaped up, till they almost reached to the holes between the palisades, through which they pointed their muskets; and as the savages contrived to slope them down from the stockade to the ground, it was evident that they meant to mount up and take them by escalade. At last, it appeared as if all the fagots had been placed, and the savages retired further back, to where the cocoanut trees were still standing.

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They have gone away, father," said William; "but they will come again, and I fear it is all over with us."

"I fear so too, my noble boy," replied Mr. Seagrave; "they are only retreating to arrange for a general assault, and they now will be able to gain an entrance. I almost wish they had fired the fagots; we might have escaped as Ready pointed out to us, but now I fear we have no chance."

"Don't say a word to my mother," said William; "let us

defend ourselves to the last, and if we are overpowered, it is the will of God!"

"I should like to take a farewell embrace of your dear mother," said Mr. Seagrave; "but no; it will be weakness just now; I had better not. Here they come, William, in a swarm. Well, God bless you, my boy; we shall all, I trust, meet in Heaven."

The whole body of savages were now advancing from the cocoanut wood in a solid mass; they raised a yell, which struck terror into the hearts of Mrs. Seagrave and Juno, yet they flinched not. The savages were again within fifty yards of them, when the fire was opened upon them; this was answered by loud yells, and the savages had already reached to the bottom of the sloping pile of fagots, when the yells and the reports of the muskets were drowned by a much louder report, followed by the crackling and breaking of the cocoanut trees, which made both parties start with surprise; another and another followed, the ground was plowed up, and the savages fell in numbers.

"It must be the cannon of a ship, father!" said William; "we are saved we are saved!”

"It can be nothing else; we are saved, and by a miracle," replied Mr. Seagrave in utter astonishment.

The savages paused in the advance, quite stupefied; again, again, again, the report of the loud guns boomed through the air, and the round shot and grape came whizzing and tearing through the cocoanut grove; at this last broadside, the savages turned and fled toward their canoes; not one was left to be seen.

"We are saved!" cried Mr. Seagrave, leaping off the plank and embracing his wife, who sunk down on her knees, and held up her clasped hands in thankfulness to Heaven.

William had hastened up to the lookout on the cocoanut tree, and now cried out to them below, as the guns were again discharged:

"A large schooner, father; she is firing at the savages, who are at the canoes; they are falling in every direction; some have plunged into the water; there is a boatful of armed men coming on shore; they are close to the beach, by the garden point. Three of the canoes have got off full of men; there go the guns again; two of the canoes are sunk, father; the boat has landed, and the people are coming up this way." William then descended from the lookout as fast as he could.

As soon as he was down, he commenced unbarring the door of the stockade. He pulled out the last pole just as he heard the feet of their deliverers outside. He threw open the door, and a second after found himself in the arms of Captain Osborn.

FRIENDSHIP.

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

WE HAVE a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Mauger all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good will, they make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend,— and forthwith troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are

uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his. partialities, his definitions, his defects into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last, and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner,but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the soul, no more.

Pleasant are these jets of affection which make a young world for me again. Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling. How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but the Deity in me and in them both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual

character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are not stark and stiffened persons, but the newborn poetry of God, poetry without stop,- hymn, ode, and epic, poetry still flowing and not yet caked in dead books with annotation and grammar, but Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet poison of misused wine" of the affections. A new person is to me always a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies lately about two or three persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine, wild, delicate, throbbing property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We overestimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his, his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect man as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by facing the fact, by mining