During stirring times, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, a brigantine like ‘The Bashful Maid,’ well-armed, well-manned, commanded by a young adventurous captain having letters of marque in his cabin, and no certain knowledge that peace had yet been proclaimed with Spain, was not likely long to preserve her sails unbleached by use nor the paint and varnish undimmed on her hull. Not many months elapsed ere she was very different in appearance from the yacht-like craft that ran past the Needles, carrying Eugène Beaudésir prone and helpless as a log in her after-cabin. He could scarcely believe himself the same man when, bronzed, robust, and vigorous, feeling every inch a sailor, he paced her deck under the glowing stars and the mellow moonlight of the tropics. Gales had been weathered since then, shots fired, prizes taken, and that career of adventure embarked on which possesses so strange a fascination for the majority of mankind, partly, I think, from its permanent uncertainty, partly from its pandering to their self-esteem. A few more swoops, another prize or two taken, pillaged, but suffered to proceed if not worth towing into port, and the cruise would have been so successful, that already the men were calculating their share of profit and talking as if their eventual return to Britain was no longer a wild impossibility. Everything, too, had as yet been done according to fair usage of war. No piracy, no cruelty, nothing that could justify a British three-decker in capturing the brigantine, to impress her crew and hang her captain at his own yard-arm. Eugène’s counsels had so far prevailed with George that he had resolved on confining himself to the legitimate profits of a privateer, and not overstepping the narrow line of demarcation that distinguished him from a pirate. While, however, some of her crew had been killed and some wounded, ‘The Bashful Maid’ herself had by no means emerged scatheless from her encounters. Eugène was foolish enough to experience a thrill of pride while he marked the grim holes, planked and caulked, in her sides; the workmanlike splicing of such yards and spars as had not suffered too severely for repair, and the carefully-mended foresail, now white and weather-bleached, save where the breadths of darker, newer canvas betrayed it had been riddled by round-shot. But soon his impressionable temperament, catching the influence of the hour, threw off its warlike thoughts and abandoned itself to those gentler associations that could hardly fail to be in the ascendant. The night was such as is only to be seen in the tropics. Above, like golden lamps, the stars were flaming rather than twinkling in the sky; while low down on the horizon a broad moon, rising from the sea, spread a lustrous path along the gently-heaving waves to the very ship’s side; a path on which myriads of glittering fairies seem to dance and revel, and disappear in changing sparkles of light.