education than usually falls to individuals of his class. At the close of the war Somers and his son were, with thousands of others, turned adrift from the royal service. Some months after my appointment to the command of the revenue-cutter, I chanced to meet the father in the village of Talton, about four miles out of Southampton, on the New Forest Road. He had, I found re-entered the navy, but chancing to receive a hurt by the falling of a heavy block on his right knee, had been invalided with a small pension, upon which he was now living at about a hundred yards from the spot where we had accidentally met. Ally, he informed me, was the skipper of a small craft, trading between Guernsey and Southampton. There was little change in the appearance of the man except that the crippled condition of his leg appeared to have had an effect the reverse of softening upon his stem and rugged aspect and temper. When paid off he was, I knew, entitled to a considerable sum in prize-money, the greater part of which he told me he had recently received. About two months after this meeting with the father I fell in with the son. I was strolling at about eleven in the forenoon along the front of the Southampton custom-house, when my eye fell upon a young man in a seaman's dress, busily engaged with three others in loading a cart with bundles of laths which had been landed shortly before from a small vessel alongside the quay. It was Ally Somers sure enough; and so much improved in looks since I last saw him, that but for a certain air of fragility--inherited probably from his mother--he might have been pronounced a handsome fine young fellow. The laths, upward of two hundred bundles, which he was so busily assisting to cart, he had brought from Guernsey, and were a very common importation from that island: Guernsey possessing the right of sending its own produce customs free to England, a slight duty, only tantamount to what the foreign timber of which the laths were made would have been liable to, was levied upon them, and this was ascertained by the proper officer simply measuring the length and girth of the bundles. This had been done, and the laths marked as "passed." It struck me that the manner of Ally Somers was greatly flurried and excited, and when he saw me approaching, evidently with an intention to accost him, this agitation perceptibly increased. He turned deadly pale, and absolutely trembled with ill-concealed apprehension. He was somewhat re-assured by my frank salutation; and after a few common-place inquiries I walked away, evidently to his great relief, and he with his sailors continued their eager work of loading the cart. I could not help suspecting that something was wrong, though I could not make up my mind to verify the surmise his perturbed and hurried manner excited. Once in a skirmish on shore his father, the boatswain, had saved my life by sending a timely bullet through the head of a huge negro who held me for the moment at