“Well, Mr. Kennedy,” says Lee, “you have told us of your victories,—have you always been victorious—have you always had the luck on your side,—where did you lose your arm?” The old man took a long and deliberate survey of the horizon ahead of us, apparently not well pleased with a dark cloud just beginning to lift itself above its edge; but whatever inferences he drew from it he kept to himself, and having relieved his mouth from the quid, and replenished the vacuum by a fresh bite of the pig-tail, he leisurely turned to us again, and replied with some emphasis—‘Them as fights the English, fights men—and though it’s been my luck to be taken twice by them, once’t in the unlucky Chesapeake, and once’t on the lakes, and though I owes the loss of my flipper to a musket marked G.R., I hopes I bears them no more grudge than becomes a true yankee sailor. Now, speaking of that, I’ve always obsarved, since the war, when our ships is in the same port, that however much we always fights, when we falls in with each other, that the moment the English or Americans gets into a muss with the French, or the Dutch, or the Spaniards, that we makes common cause, and tumbles in and helps one another—but I’m blest! but that Chesapeake business was a bad affair. They took the ship;—let them have the credit of it, say I;—but no great credit neither; for half the men was foreigners in a state of mutiny, and none of the men know’d their officers. I hearn Captain Lawrence say himself, after he was carried below, that when he ordered the bugle-man to sound, to repel boarders, the cursed Portuguese was so frightened, or treacherous, that no sound came from the bugle, though his cheeks swelled as if in the act; and I hearn a British officer say to one of our’n, that Captain Lawrence owed his death to his wearing a white cravat into action, and that a sharp-shooter in their tops picked him off, knowing as how, that no common man would be so dressed. I don’t complain of their getting the best of it, for that’s the fortune of war; but they behaved badly after the colours was hauled down. They fired down the hatches, and“—lifting his hat, and exhibiting a seam that measured his head from the crown to the ear—”I received this here slash from the cutlash of a drunken sailor, for my share, as I came up the main-hatch, after she surrendered—My eyes! all the stars in heaven was dancing before me as I tumbled back senseless on the gun-deck below; and when they brought the ship into Halifax, she smelt more like a slaughter-house nor a Christian man-of-war. Howsomever, they whipt us, and there’s an end of the matter—only I wish’t our gallant Lawrence might have died before the colours came down, and been spared the pain of seeing his ship in the hands of the enemy. It was what we old sailors expected, though. She was an unlucky ship, and that disgraceful affair between her and the Leopard, was enough to take the luck out of any ship. Now if it had been “Old