* * * * * {437}

ANECDOTE OF CHARLES I.

I have great pleasure in forwarding to you an anecdote of the captivity
of Charles I., which I think will be considered interesting to your
readers. Of its authenticity there can be no doubt. I extract it from a
small paper book, purchased some fifty years since, at Newport, in the
Isle of Wight, which contains the history of a family named Douglas, for
some years resident in that town, written by the last representative,
Eliza Douglas, at the sale of whose effects it came into my
grandfather's hands. There are many curious particulars in it besides
the anecdote I have sent you; especially an account of the writer's
great-great-grandfather (the husband of the heroine of this tale), who
"traded abroad, and was took into Turkey as a slave," and there gained
the affections of his master's daughter, after the most approved
old-ballad fashion; though, alas! it was not to her love that he owed
his liberty, but (dreadful bathos!) to his skill in "cooking fowls, &c.
&c. in the English taste;" which, on a certain occasion, when some
English merchants came to dine with his master, "so pleased the company,
that they offered to redeem him, which was accepted; and when freed he
came home to England, and lived in London to an advanced age; so old
that they fed him with a tea-spoon."

After his death his wife married again; and it was during this second
marriage that the interview with King Charles took place.

"My mother's great-grandmother, when a-breeding with her
daughter, Mary Craige, which was at y'e time of _King Charles_
being a _prisoner_ in _Carisbrook Castle_, she longed to kiss