was given, and Shearer led the excited crowds toward my position. With great ceremony I drew a circle round the lighted skulls, and forbade the already frightened audience from passing that bound on pain of death. I sat in the center of the circle, with my head between my hands, waiting for time to pass until the eclipse should be complete, or nearly so. The silence and anxiety of that immense crowd of savages was something fearful. I was undertaking a dangerous experiment. If it failed, the consequences might be fatal; if it succeeded, my influence among them would be almost unbounded. Circumstanced as I was, the thing was worth trying. As an officer of my country, I felt the necessity of obtaining a moral as well as physical ascendancy of these populous tribes, which occupied the highway of immigration between the East and the West. I was almost alone among them, and they had begun to despise the paucity of my force. It had become necessary to re-assert our superiority, and the adventitious circumstances before related favored my attempt. Crouched down, with a naked sabre in my hand, gleaming with the lights thrown through the sightless sockets of the encircling skulls, I impatiently waited the time to apply the match to my train. It came at last. The train was touched; the brilliant flame flashed with the speed of lightning and ignited the fuses, which fizzed and sputtered, and sent forth streams of bright sparks, lighting up the scene with somewhat of radiance, when suddenly the whole affair terminated in darkness. The change from intense light was so great that no one observed Shearer draw in and secrete the skulls, and when vision was restored the whole paraphernalia had passed away. In the meantime, the moon began to reappear; its disc became rapidly more observable and brilliant, until she again "O'er the dark her sil-
