The _Rose_ had been becalmed for several days in Cowes Harbor, and utterly at a loss how else to cheat the time, I employed myself one afternoon in sauntering up and down the quay, whistling for a breeze, and listlessly watching the slow approach of a row-boat, bringing the mail and a few passengers from Southampton, the packet-cutter to which the boat belonged being as hopelessly immovable, except for such drift as the tide gave her, as the _Rose_. The slowness of its approach--for I expected a messenger with letters--added to my impatient weariness; and as, according to my reckoning, it would be at least an hour before the boat reached the landing-steps, I returned to the Fountain Inn in the High-street, called for a glass of negus, and as I lazily sipped it, once more turned over the newspapers lying on the table, though with scarcely a hope of coming athwart a line that I had not read half a dozen times before. I was mistaken. There was a "Cornwall Gazette" among them which I had not before seen, and in one corner of it I lit upon this, to me in all respects new and extremely interesting paragraph: "We copy the following statement from a contemporary, solely for the purpose of contradicting it: 'It is said that the leader of the smugglers in the late desperate affray with the coast guard in St. Michael's Bay, was no other than Mr. George Polwhele Hendrick, of Lostwithiel, formerly, as our readers are aware, a lieutenant in the royal navy, and dismissed the king's service by sentence of court-martial at the close of the war.' There is no foundation for this imputation. Mrs. Hendrick, of Lostwithiel, requests us to state that her son, from whom she heard but about ten days since, commands a first-class ship in the merchant navy of the United States."