wisp, lured me on. I conducted one of the fireships at Lord Cochrane's attack upon the French fleet in Basque Roads; had the command of a gunboat at the storming of St. Sebastian, and was with the army at the sortie from Bayonne, in which I got a crack on the head-not big enough to jump in, to be sure, but it set my brains spinning for a month. I commanded a fast-sailing schooner charged with despatches for Wellington, when he was expected to occupy Bordeaux, and entered the Garonne in the dead of the night, lighted on my way by the flames of a French eighty-gun ship that had been set on fire to prevent her falling into the hands of the English; and having anchored in a secure position, left my vessel in a four-oared boat, passed the batteries undiscovered, and executed my orders as the brave marshal stood in the great square, with white flags and beauty greeting his arrival.

Peace came: Buonaparte was elbowed off to Elba, and the “red flag at the fore" was as far off as ever. My vessel was paid off, and after many years of activity, I entered upon a life of indolence. But as Dr.Watts very wisely observes, in one of the hymns which I was compelled to learn at school when a child,

"Satan finds some mischief still,

For idle hands to do ;"

so I e'en got married. The fair lady (she is now peeping over my shoulder) attracted my attention at church by the broad and bright ribands that graced the front of her bonnet. They reminded me of the "red flag at the fore,” and an inglorious sigh escaped. Now every body knows that a sigh is the beginning of love, for Byron says,

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'Oh, love! what is it in this world of ours
That makes it fatal to be loved? Ah, why
With cypress dost thou wreath thy bowers,

And make thy best interpreter a sigh?"

Well, but to make short of it, I got married ; but no sooner had Napoleon returned from Elba, than I was again at my duty. I was sent by Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then naval commander-in-chief at Ostend, with a party of seamen to man the great guns in the army under Wellington on the plains of Waterloo, and the "red flag at the fore once more opened on my view. It was on the very morning after the decisive battle, that between Brussels and Bruges, I met the first detachment of prisoners coming down from the field, and was ordered to take charge of them to Ostend. There were about two thousand officers and men, most of them wounded and without a single application or dressing to the mangled parts; yet their devotion to Napoleon was unabated, and with their stiffened

limbs sore with laceration, and their bodies gashed and scored with sabre cuts, they still shouted, Vice l'Empereur!"

The battle of Waterloo ended the war; Buonaparte was despatched to St. Helena, and all prospects of promotion are over. My noble patron has accomplished the number of his days, and no “red flag at the fore” will ever fall to my lot, unless indeed I include a certain Bardolphian tinge to the most prominent feature of my face, which has been red at the fore for some years past; but excepting the half-pay of a lieutenant, a small remnant of prize-money, and a wife and seven children, I am as poor as a churchwarden's charity-box.

"It is thou, Liberty! thrice sweet and gracious goddess, whom all in public and in private worship, whose taste is grateful and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change."

STERNE.

TWENTY years had floated down the stream of time since my escape from a French prison, and my almost immediate embarkation for the East Indies with cheerful prospects and with a glowing heart. Hope and enterprise urged me on in my career, and the efforts of my industry were crowned with complete success. But ah! how dear the purchase; an Asiatic clime had undermined my constitution, and ill health had rendered me peevish and discontented; so that I determined once more to visit the land of my nativity, and I embarked in an Indiaman for that purpose.

Only those who have been long estranged from the home of their fathers, and are returning to it with ardent expectation and thrilling apprehensions -only those can tell the mingling sensations of pain and pleasure that agitate the breast, as the tall ship urges on her course— splash, splash,

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along the wave,”—while the anxious mariner, day after day, calculates his distance from the shore and sighs to find it is yet so far away.

At last, I trod on British ground, but how changed were all things since my departure! The authors of my being were no more; the companions of my youth were scattered upon the wide world, or numbered with the dead; while others whom I had folded in my arms at parting, and felt my cheek bedewed with their tears, now received me with distant politeness and cold reserve. No cheering heart-descriptive smile of affection welcomed my return, and I found myself alone, unfriended and unblest. Society became my aversion, and withdrawing from the world to the cottage where I first received existence, my days were passed in nurturing the melancholy that consumed my heart, and my chief gratification was to pass the hours of solitude near the tomb of my parents. There I would pour out my griefs, and pray to join them in the blissful realms of immortality; but a life like this, working upon a debilitated constitution, soon shattered my intellects, and my reason became impaired.

One lovely evening in August, I had taken my usual position, and the stillness of the hour, the serenity of the air, the surrounding scenery, teeming with the choicest blessings of nature's store