This boyish fancy faded but slowly and lingeringly away with the busy and tumultuous years which passed over my head, till the peace of 1815 cast me an almost useless sea-waif upon the land, to take root and vegetate there as I best might upon a lieutenant's half-pay. My father had died about two years before, and the hundred a year he left us was scarcely more than sufficient for the support of my sister, whose chances of an eligible marriage had vanished with her comeliness, which a virulent attack of small-pox had utterly destroyed, though it had in nothing changed the patient sweetness of her disposition, and the gentle loving spirit that shone through all its disfiguring scars and seams. I had never heard directly from Ellen Dible, although, during the first months of separation, I had written to her many times; the reason of which was partially explained by a few lines in one of Jane's letters, announcing Ellen Dible's marriage--it seemed under some kind of moral compulsion--to a person of their own grade, and their removal from Itchen. This happened about six months after my last interview with her. I made no further inquiries, and, Jane thinking the subject might be a painful one, it happened that, by a kind of tacit understanding, it was never afterward alluded to between us. The utter weariness of an idle shore life soon became insupportable, and I determined to solicit the good offices of Sir Joseph Yorke with the Admiralty. The gallant admiral had now taken up his permanent residence near Hamble, a village on the river of that name, which issues into the Southampton water not very far from opposite Calshot Castle. Sir Joseph was drowned there about eight or nine years after I left the station. A more perfect gentleman, let me pause a moment to say, or a better seaman, than Sir Joseph, never, I believe, existed; and of a handsome, commanding presence too--"half-way up a hatchway" at least, to use his own humorous self-description, his legs scarcely corresponding in vigorous outline to the rest of his person. He received me with his usual frank urbanity, and I left him provided with a letter to the secretary of the admiralty--the ultimate and not long-delayed result of which was my appointment to the command of the _Rose_ revenue-cutter, the duties attached to which consisted in carefully watching, in the interest of His Majesty's customs, the shores of the Southampton river, the Solent sea, the Wight, and other contiguous portions of the seaboard of Hants and Dorset.