Yet French as she was, and as any Jack Tar would have informed you in a moment had you not known--after he had run a fierce eye along her shape and marked other things about her as well--there flew above her no flag proclaiming that she was owned by Louis le Bien-aimé (Bien-aimé by countless women, perhaps, but never, surely, by the subjects whom he taxed and ground to the soil they sweated over). For instead, streaming out from her mainmast there flew, because it was war-time and she lay in the King's chief river, the Royal Standard of England; from her foremast, the Anchor of Hope, the flag of the Lord High Admiral; and from her mizzen, the white flag, with the red St. George's cross; also she flew the same flag from her jack-staff. French though she may have been, none who saw those noble ensigns could doubt what she was now. In fact, she was a capture, taken by an English ship, which in her turn had once been French--_Le Duc d'Acquitaine_--and she lay, on this wild, tempestuous March day, off Blackwall and the historic Bugsby's Hole, under the temporary command of Captain Sir Geoffrey Barry. There are ironies in the life of other things besides human beings--in ships, perhaps, more especially than amongst other inanimate creatures--and the _Mignonne_ was an example that such was the case. In her thirty years of existence she had been fighting fiercely on behalf of France against her hereditary foe--England; now she lay in the Thames, serving as a vessel into which were brought scores of impressed men, as well as scores of others who were burning to fight as willing sailors against her former owners. For at this time there was a hot press wherever men could be found; all along and around the coast of England it was going on; every vessel of war was being stuffed full of Englishmen who, willingly or unwillingly, had to take part in the deeds that were doing and that still had to be done. Were not privateers and merchantmen being taken daily? Was not Boscawen raging the seas like a devouring lion; Sir Edward Hawke hurling insults at the French fleet in an attempt to bring them to action; Rodney bombarding their coast? Were not those French also swearing that, ere long, their invasion of England should take place, and should be final, decisive, and triumphant? No wonder, therefore, that sailors were wanted--and found! No wonder that husbands were torn from their wives, and fathers from their children; that men disappeared from their homes and were never more heard of, since, often not more than a month later, they were lying at the bottom of the sea, after having been sunk with their ships in some great naval fight, or, having been slain on board those ships, had next been flung over their sides--legless, armless, headless.