who was not born to be second to any one, retired instantly to St. Albans, and announced that he would make it the centre of fashion and of society, instead of degenerate London.  It chanced, however, that the mayor and corporation waited upon him with an address of thanks for his good intentions towards the town, and that the burgesses, having ordered new coats from London for the occasion, were all arrayed in velvet collars, which so preyed upon my uncle’s spirits that he took to his bed, and never showed his face in public again.  His money, which had ruined what might have been a great life, was divided amongst many bequests, an annuity to his valet, Ambrose, being amongst them; but enough has come to his sister, my dear mother, to help to make her old age as sunny and as pleasant as even I could wish.

And as for me—­the poor string upon which these beads are strung—­I dare scarce say another word about myself, lest this, which I had meant to be the last word of a chapter, should grow into the first words of a new one.  Had I not taken up my pen to tell you a story of the land, I might, perchance, have made a better one of the sea; but the one frame cannot hold two opposite pictures.  The day may come when I shall write down all that I remember of the greatest battle ever fought upon salt water, and how my father’s gallant life was brought to an end as, with his paint rubbing against a French eighty-gun ship on one side and a Spanish seventy-four upon the other he stood eating an apple in the break of his poop.  I saw the smoke banks on that October evening swirl slowly up over the Atlantic swell, and rise, and rise, until they had shredded into thinnest air, and lost themselves in the infinite blue of heaven.  And with them rose the cloud which had hung over the country; and it also thinned and thinned, until God’s own sun of peace and security was shining once more upon us, never more, we hope, to be bedimmed.

*** End of the project gutenberg EBOOK, Rodney stone ***

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