Margaret went.  There were the yellow, sea-stained letters, with the peculiar fragrance which ocean letters have:  Margaret carried them back to her mother, who untied the silken string with trembling fingers, and, examining their dates, she gave them to Margaret to read, making her hurried, anxious remarks on their contents, almost before her daughter could have understood what they were.

’You see, Margaret, how from the very first he disliked Captain Reid.  He was second lieutenant in the ship—­the Orion—­in which Frederick sailed the very first time.  Poor little fellow, how well he looked in his midshipman’s dress, with his dirk in his hand, cutting open all the newspapers with it as if it were a paper-knife!  But this Mr. Reid, as he was then, seemed to take a dislike to Frederick from the very beginning.  And then—­stay! these are the letters he wrote on board the Russell.  When he was appointed to her, and found his old enemy Captain Reid in command, he did mean to bear all his tyranny patiently.  Look! this is the letter.  Just read it, Margaret.  Where is it he says—­Stop—­’my father may rely upon me, that I will bear with all proper patience everything that one officer and gentleman can take from another.  But from my former knowledge of my present captain, I confess I look forward with apprehension to a long course of tyranny on board the Russell.’  You see, he promises to bear patiently, and I am sure he did, for he was the sweetest-tempered boy, when he was not vexed, that could possibly be.  Is that the letter in which he speaks of Captain Reid’s impatience with the men, for not going through the ship’s manoeuvres as quickly as the Avenger?  You see, he says that they had many new hands on board the Russell, while the Avenger had been nearly three years on the station, with nothing to do but to keep slavers off, and work her men, till they ran up and down the rigging like rats or monkeys.’

Margaret slowly read the letter, half illegible through the fading of the ink.  It might be—­it probably was—­a statement of Captain Reid’s imperiousness in trifles, very much exaggerated by the narrator, who had written it while fresh and warm from the scene of altercation.  Some sailors being aloft in the main-topsail rigging, the captain had ordered them to race down, threatening the hindmost with the cat-of-nine-tails.  He who was the farthest on the spar, feeling the impossibility of passing his companions, and yet passionately dreading the disgrace of the flogging, threw himself desperately down to catch a rope considerably lower, failed, and fell senseless on deck.  He only survived for a few hours afterwards, and the indignation of the ship’s crew was at boiling point when young Hale wrote.