For it chanced, that the young earl, after a period of refuge at his Welsh castle, supposing, as he well might, that his latest mad freak of the proposal of his hand and title to the strange girl in a quadrille at a foreign castle had been forgotten by her, and the risks of annoyance on the subject had quite blown over, returned to town, happy in having done the penance for his impulsiveness, and got clean again—­that is to say, struck off his fetters and escaped from importunities—­the very morning of the day when Lord Levellier sprang upon him!  It shows the old campaigner’s shrewdness in guessing where his prey would come, and not putting him on his guard by a call at his house.  Out of the window he looked for all the hours of light during an entire fortnight.  ’In the service of my sister’s child,’ he said.  ’To save him from the cost of maintaining her,’ say his enemies.  At any rate he did it.

He was likely to have done the worse which I suspect.

Now, the imparting of the wonderful news to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham was, we read, the whiff of a tropical squall to lay him on his beam ends.  He could not but doubt; and his talk was like the sails of a big ship rattling to the first puff of wind.  He had to believe; and then, we read, he was for hours like a vessel rolling in the trough of the sea.  Of course he was a disappointed father.  Naturally his glance at the loss to Henrietta of the greatest prize of the matrimonial market of all Europe and America was vexing and saddening.  Then he woke up to think of the fortunes of his ‘other girl,’ as he named her, and cried:  ’Crinny catches him!’

He cried it in glee and rubbed his hands.

So thereupon, standing before him, Chillon John, from whom he had the news, bent to him slightly, as his elegant manner was, and lengthened the admiral’s chaps with another proposal; easy, deliberate, precise, quite the respectful bandit, if you please, determined on having his daughter by all means, only much preferring the legal, formal, and friendly.  Upon that, in the moment of indecision, Henrietta enters, followed by Admiral Baldwin’s heroine, his Crinny, whom he embraced and kissed, congratulated and kissed again.  One sees the contrivance to soften him.

So it was done, down in that Hampshire household on the heights near the downs, whence you might behold, off a terra firma resembling a roll of billows, England’s big battle-ships in line fronting the island; when they were a spectacle of beauty as well as power:  which now they are no more, but will have to be, if they are both to float and to fight.  For I have, had quoted to me by a great admirer of the Old Buccaneer, one of the dark sayings in his maxims for men, where Captain John Peter Kirby commends his fellow-men to dissatisfaction with themselves if they have not put an end to their enemy handsomely..  And he advises the copying of Nature in this; whose elements have always, he says, a pretty, besides a