“Denbigh,” cried the sailor, eyeing him keenly, “Isabel is my only child, and a dutiful, good girl; one that will obey orders if she breaks owners, as we sailors say.  Now I did think of marrying her to a seaman, when a proper man came athwart my course; yet your son is a soldier, and that is next to being in the navy:  if-so-be you had made him come aboard me, when I wanted you to, there would have been no objection at all:  however, when occasion offers.  I will overhaul the lad, and if I find him staunch he may turn in with Bell and welcome.”

This was uttered in perfect simplicity, and with no intention of giving offence, partaking partly of the nature of a soliloquy; so the general, greatly encouraged, was about to push the point, when a gun was fired from their own ship.

“There’s some of them lubberly transports won’t mind our signals; they have had these soldiers so long on board, they get as clumsy as the red-coats themselves,” muttered the admiral, hastening on deck to enforce his commands.

A shot or two, sent significantly in the direction of the wanderers, but so as not to hit them, restored order; and within an hour forty line of battle ships and a hundred transports were disposed in the best manner for convenience and safety.

On their presentation to their sovereign, both veterans were embellished with the riband of the Bath; and as their exploits filled the mouths of the newsmongers, and the columns of the public prints of the day, the new knights began to think more seriously of building a monument to their victories, in a union between their children.  The admiral, however, determined to do nothing with his eyes shut, and he demanded a scrutiny.

“Where is the boy who is to be a duke?” exclaimed he, one day, when his friend had introduced the point with a view to a final arrangement.  “Bell has good blood in her veins—­is a tight built little vessel—­clean heel’d and trim, and would make as good a duchess as the best of them; so Denbigh, I will begin by taking a survey of the senior.”

To this the general had no objection, as he well knew that Francis would be wide of pleasing the tastes of an open-hearted, simple man, like the sailor.  They met, accordingly, for what the general facetiously called the review, and what the admiral innocently termed his survey, at the house of the former, when the young gentlemen were submitted to his inspection.

Francis Denbigh was about four and twenty, of a feeble body, and with a face marked with the small-pox, to approaching deformity; his eye was brilliant and piercing, but unsettled, and at times wild—­his manner awkward, constrained, and timid.  There would be seen, it is true, an intelligence and animation, which occasionally lighted his countenance into gleams of sunshine, that caused you to overlook the lesser accompaniments of complexion and features in the expression; but they were transient, and inevitably vanished whenever his father spoke or in any manner mingled in his pursuits.