Money I didn't need; and as for fame or rank, I neither had the ambition, nor did I ever fancy myself intended for an admiral or a Nelson: all my wish was to be up and driving about, on account of something that was _within_ me. I enjoyed a good breeze as some do champagne; and the very perfection of glory, to my thinking, was to be the soul of a gallant ship in a regular Atlantic howler; or to play at long bowls with one's match to leeward, off the ridges of a sea, with both weather and the enemy to think of. Accordingly, I wasn't at all inclined to go jogging along in one of your easy merchantmen, where you have nothing new to find out; and I only waited to hear from some friends who were bestirring themselves with the Board, of a ship where there might be something to do. These were my notions in those days, before getting sobered down, which I tell you for the sake of not seeming such a fool in this said adventure. Well, one evening my sister Jane and I went to a race-ball at Epsom, where, of course, we saw all the "beauty and fashion," as they say, of the country round, with plenty of the army men, who were in all their glory, with Waterloo and all that; we two or three poor nauticals being quite looked down upon in comparison, since Nelson was dead, and we had left nothing at the end to fight with. I even heard one belle ask a dragoon "what uniform that was--was it the horse-artillery corps?" "Haw!" said the dragoon, squinting at me through an eyeglass, and then looking with one eye at his spurs and with the other at his partner, "Not at all sure! I _do_ think, after all, Miss ----, 'tis the--the marine body,--a sort of amphibious animals! They weren't with _us_, though, you know,--_couldn't_ be, indeed, though it _was_ _Water_-loo! Haw! haw! you'll excuse the joke, Miss ----?" "Ha! ha! how extremely witty, Captain ----!" said the young lady, and they whirled away towards the other end of the hall. But, had there been an opportunity, by the honour of the flag, and nothing personal, I declare I should have done--what the fool deserved,--had it been before all his brethren and the Duke himself! It was not ten minutes after, that I saw what I thought the loveliest young creature ever crossed my eyes, coming out of the refreshment-room with two ladies, an old and an elderly one. The first was richly dressed, and I set her down for an aunt, she was so unlike; the other for a governess. The young lady was near sixteen to appearance, dressed in white. There were many beauties in the ball-room you would have called handsomer; but there was something about her altogether I could compare to nothing else but the white figure-head of the Iris, sliding gently along in the first curl of a breeze, with the morning-sky far out on the bow,--curious as you may think it, ladies! Her hair was brown, and her complexion remarkably pale notwithstanding; while her eyes were as dark-blue, too, as--as the ocean near the line,