The London of Queen Anne’s reign was not the huge overgrown London of our own day.  But it was a notable city, and to George Fairburn and his contemporaries the grandest city in the world.  The Great Fire had taken place but twenty years before George was born, yet already the city had risen from its ashes, with wider and nobler streets, and with a multitude of handsome churches which Wren had built.  The new and magnificent St. Paul’s, the great architect’s proudest work, was rapidly approaching completion.  George’s father had witnessed the opening for worship of a portion of the cathedral five years before, and soon the stupendous dome, which was beginning to tower high above the city, would be finished.  Sir Thomas Gresham’s Exchange, the centre of the business life of the city, had been replaced by another and not less noble edifice.  The great capital contained a population of well over half a million souls, a number that seemed incredible to those who knew only Bristol, and York, and Norwich, the English cities next in size.  The houses stretched continuously from the city boundary to Westminster, and soon the two would be but one vast town.  George had heard much of London Bridge, with its shops and its incessant stream of passengers and vehicles, and he hoped to visit the pleasant villages of Kensington and Islington, and many another that lay within a walk of great London.  He hoped one day, too, to get a glimpse of some of the clever wits, Mat Prior, Wycherley, Dick Steele, and others, who haunted the coffee-houses of the capital, and of the rising young writer, Mr. Addison, not to mention a greater than them all, the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton.  For George had ever been a great reader, even while he loved a good game as well as any boy in the land.

It was many a long year, however, ere George Fairburn was destined to see the mighty capital.  Once fairly at sea, the skipper brought out and mounted his four little guns, to the lad’s huge joy.

“You mean business, captain,” he remarked with a merry laugh.

“I do, if there comes along a Frenchy who won’t leave us alone,” the old fellow replied, “leastways if she isn’t too big a craft for us altogether.”

The evening was coming in, the town of Yarmouth faintly visible through the haze, when suddenly the crew of the Ouseburn Lassie became aware of a big vessel in the offing.

“She’s giving chase, by thunder!” cried the skipper, after he had taken a long look through the glass; and all was excitement on board the brig.  Anxiously all hands watched the stranger, and at last the shout went up, “She’s a Frenchy!”

“Aye, and a big ’un at that,” somebody added.

Hastily the preparations were made to receive her, though the captain shook his head even as he gave his orders.

“It’s no go,” he whispered to George.  “We’ve got these four small guns, but what’s the good?  We’ve nobody to man ’em; only a couple on ’em, leastways.  And the Frenchman’s a monster.”