I have gone on too long. One more picture, and I have done. On the Hard, along the railings which ran in the front, only ceasing with the beach and the Logs, extended a long bench, on which every morning all the year round, except in rain and snow, there sat a row of grizzled veterans. They were mostly one-legged; some were no-legged. The bench presented a very remarkable spectacle of "timber toes," _i.e._, wooden legs sticking out in a horizontal row. The owners of the "timber toes" were affable; they would graciously accept a quid, or the price of one, or the equivalent of a quartern of rum, and in return they would cheerfully tip you a yarn--but, for choice, beyond the hearing of the other old boys. Now the really remarkable thing about these heroes was that every man among them had been on board the _Victory_ at Trafalgar; every man among them had been the first man to observe when Nelson fell, the first man to pick him up, the chief hand in carrying him to the cockpit, the trusted man kept down by the surgeon to perform the last offices for the dying Admiral. Nay, so often had every man told this story that he had at last come to believe it; and the genuine tears would crowd into his eyes when he arrived at the last scene in the mournful history: "'Kiss me, 'Ardy,' was the last words of the Dyinero." They had of course other memories which were, I believe, more authentic. There were memories of the American war in 1814, of French prisons, of actions long since forgotten, of admirals whose fame has been eclipsed by that of Nelson. I remember one man who was in the Mutiny at the Nore, which was in 1796; and one ancient mariner I remember who said he was a cabin-boy with Captain Cook in his last voyage--he saw him speared. Well, it was quite possible; the man looked a mere monument of antiquity; it was quite possible if he was eighty-eight--he looked ninety-eight. It was quite possible, on the other hand--but let me believe that I have myself conversed and shaken hands with one of Captain Cook's crew. THE SAILING OF JEAN-PAUL. (_In Two Instalments._) BY M. L. VAN VORST. I. The grandmother of Jean-Paul was proud of the boy. She said he was as "brave as a lion, as brown as a berry, as straight as a birch." Indeed she talked so much about him, and repeated this so many times, that her companions the washer-women grew tired of hearing about Jean-Paul, and after awhile she found that she talked to deaf ears. "Are there not other boys in the village besides Jean-Paul?" they said. "There are Joseph and Victor and Charles. And what has Jean-Paul done, after all? Nothing." So the old woman held her peace, and ceased to say aloud the things she thought about her big brown grandson. Jean-Paul lived with his grandmother, Mère Vatinel, in a tiny house made of pieces of flint stuck together with white cement. It had a bright red roof, and looked like a house in a fairy-tale.