Captain Maffit boasted of his daughter, and related the circumstance of the capture of the rebel vessel--in which she was going from Nassau to Charleston--when attempting to run the blockade. He commented with great _goût_ upon her bravery, in telling the Government officials--before whom she had to appear in New York--that she acknowledged no Government but that of the Southern Confederacy, and no President but Jeff. Davis. He also told us of a letter written by his youngest son, in which the hopeful youth requested his father to “send him a Yankee’s head with the teeth all in!!!” The boy, we understood him to say, was only _five years old_![46] None of us dared to give utterance to the thoughts suggested on hearing of so savage a request from such a child,--if, indeed, the child ever made it;--and it is difficult to think that Christendom, in this age of the world, is capable of producing a father willing thus to advertise the disgustingly precocious ferocity of his little son. The bloody request indicated the Nero-like training to which the child had been subjected, and the malicious hatred he was already capable of bearing towards his kind. If this is the child, what will be the horrid proportions of the man? From a late New York paper--for the perusal of which we were indebted to Captain Maffit--we learned of the noble generosity of the merchants of that city, in sending a ship loaded with food to the starving Lancashire operatives; and on observing the name of A. A. Low, Esq.,--the owner of the _Jacob Bell_,--as one of the most active in that work of mercy, we involuntarily looked around the cabin, the finishing of which, with all its furniture and fixtures, told us what was too true, that to England--or rather to a class of her grasping and unprincipled merchants and cotton-brokers--Mr. Low owed the loss of his ship, and we our fearful perils and captivity. Whatever else may be forgotten, it certainly is to be hoped that when the history of this war is written, the noble and truly Christian manner in which the New York merchants returned good for evil will not be lost sight of. Captain Maffit was much in the cabin during the day, making himself very facetious, and was always full of anecdote. He often mentioned incidents in regard to the rebellion,--giving us what he termed the truth as to the condition and suffering of the North,--which, not then knowing his true character, and having been months without news from the United States, gave us painful uneasiness.