None of the mighty people repented of having the Old Buccaneer—­for that night, at all events.  He sat in the midst of them, you may believe, like the lord of that table, with his great white beard and hair—­not a lock of it shed—­and his bronze lion-face, and a resolute but a merry eye that he had.  He was no deep drinker of wine, but when he did drink, and the wine champagne, he drank to show his disdain of its powers; and the emperor wishing for a narrative of some of his exploits, particularly the blowing up of his ship, Kirby paid his Majesty the compliment of giving it him as baldly as an official report to the Admiralty.  So disengaged and calm was he, with his bottles of champagne in him, where another would have been sparkling and laying on the colours, that he was then and there offered Admiral’s rank in the Imperial navy; and the Old Buccaneer, like a courtier of our best days, bows to Countess Fanny, and asks her, if he is a free man to go:  and, No, says she, we cannot spare you!  And there was a pretty wrangle between Countess Fanny and the emperor, each pulling at the Old Buccaneer to have possession of him.

He was rarely out of her sight after their first meeting, and the ridiculous excuse she gave to her husband’s family was, she feared he would be kidnapped and made a Cossack of!  And young Lord Cressett, her husband, began to grumble concerning her intimacy with a man old enough to be her grandfather.  As if the age were the injury!  He seemed to think it so, and vowed he would shoot the old depredator dead, if he found him on the grounds of Cressett:  ‘like vermin,’ he said, and it was considered that he had the right, and no jury would have convicted him.  You know what those days were.

He had his opportunity one moonlight night, not far from the castle, and peppered Kirby with shot from a fowling-piece at, some say, five paces’ distance, if not point-blank.

But Kirby had a maxim, Steady shakes them, and he acted on it to receive his enemy’s fire; and the young lord’s hand shook, and the Old Buccaneer stood out of the smoke not much injured, except in the coat-collar, with a pistol cocked in his hand, and he said: 

’Many would take that for a declaration of war, but I know it ’s only your lordship’s diplomacy’; and then he let loose to his mad fun, astounding Lord Cressett and his gamekeeper, and vowed, as the young lord tried to relate subsequently, as well as he could recollect the words—­ here I have it in print:—­’that he was a man pickled in saltpetre when an infant, like Achilles, and proof against powder and shot not marked with cross and key, and fetched up from the square magazine in the central depot of the infernal factory, third turning to the right off the grand arcade in Kingdom-come, where the night-porter has to wear wet petticoats, like a Highland chief, to make short work of the sparks flying about, otherwise this world and many another would not have to wait long for combustion.’