reached them, and Kirby, without losing an hour, laid hold of an English
clergyman of the Established Church and put him through the ceremony of
celebrating his lawful union with the beautiful young creature he adored.
And this he did, he said, for the world to guard his Fan in a wider
circle than his two arms could compass, if not quite so well.

So the Old Buccaneer was ever after that her lawful husband, and as his
wedded wife, not wedded to a fool, she was an example to her sex, like
many another woman who has begun badly with a light-headed mate. It is
hard enough for a man to be married to a fool, but a man is only half-
cancelled by that burden, it has been said; whereas a woman finds herself
on board a rudderless vessel, and often the desperate thing she does is
to avoid perishing! Ten months, or eleven, some say, following the
proclamation of the marriage-tie, a son was born to Countess Fanny, close
by the castle of Chillon-on-the-lake, and he had the name of Chillon
Switzer John Kirby given to him to celebrate the fact.

Two years later the girl was born, and for the reason of her first seeing
the light in that Austrian province, she was christened Carinthia Jane.
She was her old father's pet; but Countess Fanny gloried in the boy. She
had fancied she would be a childless woman before he gave sign of coming;
and they say she wrote a little volume of Meditations in Prospect of
Approaching Motherhood, for the guidance of others in a similar
situation.

I have never been able to procure the book or pamphlet, but I know she
was the best of mothers, and of wives too. And she, with her old
husband, growing like a rose out of a weather-beaten rock, proved she was
that, among those handsome foreign officers poorly remarkable for their
morals. Not once had the Old Buccaneer to teach them a lesson. Think of