"Oscar," said his father, "remember, that though you may attain to rank by interest, you can never obtain glory, but by deserving it!" "Have I not the glory of being your son, sir!" replied Oscar, smiling. "I have not even a name by inheritance!" thought Edmund; "I, therefore, must endeavour to earn one." As intercourse continued, and friendship grew, Edmund saw in his young friend daily evidences of a heart overflowing with every amiable and generous sentiment; also, a high sense of honour--worldly honour, we mean, which had been carefully inculcated by his father. Of any other standard of right, Oscar Ormond had little or no idea. The predominant weakness of his character, was an idle degree of vanity about his rank--the consequence of the early lessons of his nurse. This uneducated and ill-judging woman, with whom he was too much left, used carefully to give him his title from infancy, always telling him what a grand thing it was for him to be a lord already, when there were so many big men, who would never be lords! Yet, strange to say, Oscar was, as we have seen, devoid of ambition in his profession, to the infinite regret of his father; but he had got it into his head, that his own hereditary rank was something much greater than any thing that could be acquired, and also, that all future steps would come, as all past ones had done--as mere matters of course. The natural consequences of his exalted birth! CHAPTER XXVIII. "Doest thou not know me?" A few days after the fleet under the command of Lord Fitz-Ullin had arrived on its station, the Glorious, Edmund's old ship, joined, and making the usual signal for a lieutenant from each vessel at anchor, our hero, as officer from the Erina, went on board. While receiving the salutations of his former friends, his attention, as well as theirs, was arrested by the appearance of a boat, which was falling alongside, and in which, if they could believe their own eyes, they beheld, in the shape of a lieutenant, Mr. St. Aubin. Henry came on board. All his old messmates collecting round him, demanded clamourously how he had got out of the scrape in which they had left him. "Scrape!" repeated Henry, in a contemptuous tone. "The best thing that ever happened to me; I might have been a poor devil of a middy, down there in your confounded cockpit yet, but for it!" "Why, d-- it," said Walton, "if I thought they would make me a post-captain for it, I would get drunk to night! but tell us how you got made, man, after our throwing you out, like spare ballast, on that rascally beach at Plymouth?" "Why," answered Henry, "I waited upon the first lord of the Admiralty, and informed him that I should prefer being a lieutenant to remaining a midshipman: upon which his lordship very politely gave me the commission I now have the honour to hold." "Yier taste was sae vara uncommon, sir!" observed the Scot, "that his lordship did na care te balk ye?"