"None, none,--not in the least!" answered the noble captain; "the hour, the quiet, the dubious light, it is just the time for such a thing. Pray favour me, and I will gaze on the Gorgon, and listen with profound attention." "We are both of us young, my lord," commenced the Frenchman; "I am but six-and-twenty, and you----" "One year your junior, Monsieur Capitaine," uttered his lordship; "but I fancy I have seen more active service than you?" "Afloat, 'tis probable, my lord," rejoined Begaud. "I was not at first destined for the marine: my early career was in the army of the North, when your Duke of York, deserted by the allied powers, (who received your money whilst they negotiated with the Directory,) retreated before our victorious troops. But I am forestalling my narrative,--heaving ahead of my reckoning, I think you'd call it. I am by birth a native of Paris, and the night of my entering the world was one of wailing, lamentation, and death. It was that on which three thousand persons were killed and wounded during a grand exhibition of fire-works, displayed in honour of the marriage of the Dauphin to the Archduchess Antoinetta Maria. Thus was I ushered into existence amidst shrieks and groans; and neither of my parents ever beheld their child. My father perished in the streets; the circumstance was indiscreetly announced to my mother; it brought on premature labour, and the living infant was taken from a corpse. What could be expected of such an introduction into life? I had an uncle residing upon the vine-clad hills that rise near the banks of the Garonne, a few leagues from Bordeaux, and there I passed my boyhood; but he was an austere man, and, having a large family of his own, I was looked upon as an incumbrance, and the only individual who appeared to commiserate my fate was an aged woman who lived in a cottage upon the estate, and was looked upon as a sibyl of no mean pretensions. She it was who first taught me to look upon yon star, and watch its capricious changes, so as to connect them with the occurrences of my life; and she it was who read my future fate on the tablets of inspiration. And who was this female? Twenty years before she had been the favourite of fortune, enjoying the luxuries of the capital, yet with an unblemished reputation. She had an only child,--a daughter, resplendent in her opening beauty of girlhood,--a type of that loveliness with which we characterise the angels. She was seen in the garden of the Tuileries by that depraved debauchee, the Fifteenth Louis; his agents secretly forced her to the Parc aux Cerfs; and the distracted mother, ascertaining the lost condition of her child, spoke publicly and loudly of the cruel grievance. But there was a Bastile then, monsieur," added he, with bitter emphasis, "engines of torture and iron cages to silence babblers; and thither was the parent sent by order of that monarch, who held the daughter in his unchaste embraces. That fellow was a wretch, my lord.