It is time now to return to our unfortunate friends, Corrie, Alice, and Poopy, who have been left long enough exposed on the summit of the cliffs, from which they had expected to be tossed by the savages, when the guns of the Talisman so opportunely saved them.

 

The reader will observe, that these incidents, which have taken so long to narrate, were enacted in a very brief space of time. Only a few hours elapsed between the firing of the broadside already referred to, and the anchoring of the Talisman in the bay, where the Foam had cast anchor some time before her; yet in this short space of time many things occurred on the island which are worthy of particular notice.

 

As we have already remarked, Corrie and his two companions in misfortune had been bound; and, in this condition, were left by the savages to their fate. Their respective positions were by no means enviable. Poor Alice lay near the edge of the cliff, with her wrists and ankles so securely tied that no effort of which she was capable could set her free. Poopy lay about ten yards farther up the cliff, flat on her sable back, with her hands tied behind her, and her ankles also secured; so that she could by no means attain to a sitting position, although she made violent and extraordinary efforts to do so. We say extraordinary, because Poopy, being ingenious, hit upon many devices of an unheard of nature to accomplish her object. Among others, she attempted to turn heels over head, hoping thus to get upon her knees; and there is no doubt whatever that she would have succeeded in this, had not the formation of the ground been exceedingly unfavourable for such a manoeuvre.

 

Corrie had shewn such an amount of desperate vindictiveness, in the way of kicking, hitting, biting, scratching, and pinching, when the savages were securing him, that they gave him five or six extra coils of the rope of cocoa-nut fibre with which they bound him. Consequently he could not move any of his limbs, and he now lay on his side between Alice and Poopy, gazing with much earnestness and no little astonishment at the peculiar contortions of the latter.

 

“You’ll never manage it, Poopy,” he remarked in a sad tone of voice, on beholding the poor girl balanced on the small of her back, preparatory to making a spring that might have reminded one of the leaps of a trout when thrown from its native element upon the bank of a river. “And you’ll break your neck if you go on like that,” he added, on observing that, having failed in these attempts, she recurred to the heels-over-head process—but all in vain.

 

“Oh, me!” sighed Poopy, as she fell back in a fit of exhaustion. “It’s be all hup wid us.”

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