This state of discomfort endured for ages--apparently; in reality, however, it lasted only a week, at the end of which period I emerged from my delirium to find myself comfortably, nay, luxuriously, disposed upon a large bed in a spacious room overlooking an extensive garden, gorgeous with strange and brilliant-hued flowers and fragrant with their mingled perfumes, which sloped very gently down to a sandy beach, beyond which was visible, through the wide-open casements of the apartment, a wide stretch of landlocked water, in the centre of which floated the hull of a vessel that I had no difficulty in identifying as the _Barracouta_.  The room which I occupied was elegantly furnished.  Its walls were decorated with several oil paintings that, to my uneducated eye at least, appeared to be exceedingly good, and dotted about the room here and there were little tables upon each of which stood a vase of magnificent flowers.  This was the scene upon which my eyes opened as I awoke from the first natural sleep that had visited me since that disastrous day when I had been struck down upon the deck of the pirate brig, and I lay for some minutes motionless, drinking in the beauty and the delight of it all, and revelling lazily in the sensation of relief from pain and fever that I was now enjoying.