Sir Joseph married in 1798 Elizabeth Weake Rattray and had a family of four sons and one daughter, afterwards Lady Agneta Bevan. Lady Yorke died in 1812, and in 1815 he married Urania, Dowager Marchioness of Clanricarde and daughter of the twelfth Lord Winchester, who survived him. During his later years he lived mostly at Sydney Lodge, occupied with family interests, and in the administration of various charities, naval and other. My grandfather was a fine type of English sailor, very handsome in his youth, as Romney's portraits show, affectionate and high-spirited; altogether one of the most attractive figures in our family history. Some following chapters will show him in his relations with his son, and mention the peculiar circumstances attending his accidental death by drowning. CHAPTER II ALGIERS. 1815-1816 Charles Philip Yorke was born on April 2, 1799, at Sydney Lodge, Hamble, and like his father, was destined from the first for a naval career. He must have been quite a small boy when Sir Joseph presented him to Lord Nelson, and the family tradition is that the hero accosted him with a kind smile and said, 'Give me a shake of your daddle, my boy, for I've only one to shake _you_ with.' The boy was sent to Harrow, and after a few years at that school was entered, in his fourteenth year, at the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth, where he formed a friendship with John Christian Schetky, then drawing master at the college, and later Marine Painter to Queen Victoria, and a man of note in his profession. What little is known of young Yorke's career at Portsmouth points to diligence and capacity, for he gained the gold medal in his second year after little more than eighteen months at the college, a distinction which ensured his immediate entry into the service. On May 15, 1815, he was appointed midshipman on board the _Prince Regent_, 98 guns, the flagship at Spithead, and a training which stood him in good stead in after life was begun under the commander of this vessel, Captain Fowke. A month later he was transferred to the _Sparrowhawk_, a brig of 18 guns commanded by Captain Baines, then under sailing orders for the Mediterranean. There was no coddling in the navy in those days, and those who survived its rigorous life were probably the fittest. I have heard my father say that at this period the middies' soup was served in the tin boxes which held their cocked hats, and that one of their amusements was provided by races round the mess table of the weevils knocked out of the biscuit which was a part of their daily fare. Young Yorke, however, accepted this life and its hardships with all cheerfulness; and the spirit with which he entered the service and the interest he took in his profession from the first are, I think, abundantly clear from a letter he wrote home to his father on July 15, 1815 from the Mediterranean, off Celebrina, after he had been a little more than a month at sea. * * * * *