Owing to his early education and the experiences of his boyhood, notwithstanding his late career in the service of King Louis, he was a seaman at heart. In nothing more so than a tendency to idealise the craft he commanded as if it were a living creature, endowed with feelings and even reason. For him ‘The Bashful Maid,’ with her exquisite trim, her raking masts, her graceful spars, her long fluttering pennon, and her elaborately-carved figure-head, representing a brazen-faced beauty baring her breast boastfully to the breeze, was less a triumph of design and carpentering, of beams, and blocks, and yarn, and varnish, and tar, than a metaphorical mistress, to be cajoled, commanded, humoured, trusted, above all, admired. He spoke of her as possessing affections, caprices, impulses, and self-will. When she answered her helm steadily, and made good weather of it, in a stiff breeze and a heavy sea, she was “behaving admirably”—“she liked the job”—“a man had only to trust her, and give her a new coat of paint now and then, she’d never fail him—not she!” While, on the other hand, she might dive and plunge, and dip her boltsprit in the brine, shipping seas that swept her decks fore and aft, and she was “only a trifle saucy, the beauty! Carried a weather-helm like the rest of her sex, and must be humoured a bit, till she came round!” As was the skipper, so were the crew. All these different natures, men of various nations, dispositions, and characters, were equally childlike in their infatuation about ‘The Bashful Maid.’ The densest of them had imagination enough to invest her with a thousand romantic qualities; even the negro would have furiously resented a word in her disparagement—nay, the three newly-shipped Jacks themselves, men of weighty authority in such matters, caught the infection, and were ready to swear by the brigantine, while it was yet so dark they could scarcely see whether she was a three-masted merchantman or a King’s cutter.