“There’s them as says the Niagara _wouldn’t_ come down, and there’s them as says she _couldn’t_—all _I_ knows is, that when our gallant young Commodore took the quarter-deck, she walked down into the thickest of it quick enough—my eyes! how we did give it to ’em, blazing away from both sides at once. We ran in between the Detroit and Charlotte, our guns crammed to the muzzle, and delivered both of our broadsides into them at the same time—grape, cannister and all,—raking the others as we passed; and the Niagara lads showed it wasn’t no fault of their’n, that they hadn’t come earlier to their work. I never know’d guns sarved smarter, than they sarved their’n, till the end of the action—nor with better effect. We soon silenced the enemy, and run up the stars again on the Lawrence as she lay a complete wrack, shattered and cut up among them, for all the world like a dead whale surrounded by shirks. They struck one after another, much like you may have seen the flags of a fleet run down after the evening gun; and as the firing ceased, and the heavy smoke bank rolled off to leeward, shiver my timbers! but it was a sight for a Yankee tar to see the striped bunting slapping triumphantly in the breeze over the British jacks at their gaffs. “If there’s any man, tho’, as says that their Commodore wasn’t a man every inch of him, aye! and as good a seaman, too, as ever walked a caulked plank, there’s one here, and his name’s Bill Kennedy, as will tell him, that he’s a know-nothing, and talks of a better man nor himself. Aye—aye—scrape the crown off his buttons, and he might mess with Decatur and Lawrence, and splice the main-brace with Stewart and Hull, and they be proud of his company. He was badly cut up, tho’, and I have hear’n tell, that when he got home to England, he wouldn’t go for to see the lady what he’d engaged to marry, but sent her word by a friend—I don’t know who that friend was—but suppose it was his first lieutenant, in course,—he sends her word that he wouldn’t hold her to her engagement—cause why, says he, ‘I’m all cut to pieces, and an’t the man I was, when she engaged for to be my wife.’ Well, what d’ye think the noble girl says, when she hearn this;—‘Tell him,’ says she, ‘as long as there’s enough of him left to hold his soul, I will be his.’—I say, Master Tom, that’s most up to the Virginny gals. Well—well—there never was but one, as would have said as much for Bill Kennedy, and she, poor Sue—she married curly-headed Bob, captain of the main-top in the Hornet,—in a pet, and was sorry when it was too late. She was a good girl, though—and I’ve lent her and her young ones a hand once’t or twice since in the breakers.” OLD KENNEDY, THE QUARTER-MASTER. (Chesapeake and Shannon—Boat Fight on Lake Ontario.) No. IV.