They found the little fellow on the ground, where he had fallen, having crawled out on the window-sill to see what had become of his sister. It was a mercy that he too had escaped with only a few bruises.
Brave little Alice Ivy! She showed unselfish love, courage, and promptness in action. We think she was a heroine. Do you agree with us? Her behavior was the more worthy of praise that she had to do something at once, and that she did the best thing under the circumstances. We are sure her mother felt thankful for such a noble daughter.
[PERIL AND PRIVATION.]
BY JAMES PAYN.
I.—ON THE KEYS OF HONDURAS.
Most readers know well the adventures of what real personage the admirable story of Robinson Crusoe was founded; and in the history of disaster connected with the sea there are the materials of ten such tales, had we only another Defoe to write them. Still, not even the mind of that master of fiction, the man of all others who knew how "to paint the thing that is not as the thing that is," could have conceived such events as it is now my purpose to describe. His fine sense of what was life-like would have resented them as being too amazing and extraordinary to have happened to the same person, and that too on a single voyage.
To be seized by pirates; to become one of them by force; to escape at the peril of one's life, but only to find one's self upon an uninhabited island, "remote from the track of navigation," and to remain there for sixteen months alone—seems too sensational to be crowded into three years of existence. Yet these things happened to Philip Ashton, an Englishman, little more than a century and a half ago.
The schooner which Ashton, who hailed from Salem, Massachusetts, was on board was seized in Port Rossaway by the famous—or infamous—Ned Low. In The Lives of Highwaymen and Robbers, which I am sorry to say was one of my favorite books when I was a boy, the story of Low's life is told, but his behavior in pirate life is not described. Ashton gives some curious particulars of it. In some respects this "bold bad" rover of the seas was by no means so black as he is painted. For example, on our hero's being carried on board Low's vessel, "which had two great guns, four swivels, and about forty men," that gentleman comes up to him with a pistol in each hand, with the inquiry, "Are you a married man?"
Terrified, not without reason, "lest there should be any hidden meaning in his words," Ashton did not reply. He did not know whether it would be wiser to say he was married or a bachelor. You see, it was very important to make a favorable impression.