And, what! you exclaim, Buccaneer Kirby full sixty-five, and Countess
Fanny no more than three and twenty, a young beauty of the world of
fashion, courted by the highest, and she in love with him! Go and gaze
at one of our big ships coming out of an engagement home with all her
flags flying and her crew manning the yards. That will give you an idea
of a young woman's feelings for an old warrior never beaten down an inch
by anything he had to endure; matching him, I dare say, in her woman's
heart, with the Mighty Highnesses who had only smelt the outside edge of
battle. She did rarely admire a valiant man. Old as Methuselah, he
would have made her kneel to him. She was all heart for a real hero.

The story goes, that Countess Fanny sent her husband to Captain Kirby,
at the emperor's request, to inquire his name; and on hearing it, she
struck her hands on her bosom, telling his Majesty he saw there the
bravest man in the king's dominions; which the emperor scarce crediting,
and observing that the man must be, then, a superhuman being to be so
distinguished in a nation of the brave, Countess Fanny related the well-
known tale of Captain Kirby and the shipful of mutineers; and how when
not a man of them stood by him, and he in the service of the first
insurgent State of Spanish America, to save his ship from being taken
over to the enemy,--he blew her up, fifteen miles from land: and so he
got to shore swimming and floating alternately, and was called Old Sky-
high by English sailors, any number of whom could always be had to sail
under Buccaneer Kirby. He fought on shore as well; and once he came down
from the tops of the Andes with a black beard turned white, and went into
action with the title of Kirby's Ghost.

But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a
ship foundering or splitting into the clouds. We are told that he never
forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval