“‘I knew pretty well what she was before that day,’ said he, smiling. ‘I had no more discoveries to make than you would have as to the fashion and strength of an old pelisse, which you had seen lent about among half your acquaintance ever since you could remember, and which at last on some very wet day is lent to yourself. Ah! she was a dear old _Asp_ to me. She did all I wanted. I knew she would. I knew that we should either go to the bottom together, or that she would be the making of me; and I never had two days of foul weather all the time I was at sea in her; and after taking privateers enough to be very entertaining, I had the good luck in my passage home the next autumn to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted. I brought her into Plymouth; and here was another instance of luck. We had not been six hours in the Sound when a gale came on which lasted four days and four nights, and which would have done for poor old _Asp_ in half the time, our touch with the Great Nation not having improved our condition. Four and twenty hours later and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers; and being lost in only a sloop, nobody would have thought about me.’ “The girls were now hunting for the _Laconia_; and Captain Wentworth could not deny himself the pleasure of taking the precious volume into his own hands to save them the trouble, and once more read aloud the little statement of her name and rate, and present non-commissioned class. Observing over it that she too had been one of the best friends man ever had. “‘Ah, those were pleasant days when I had the _Laconia_! How fast I made money in her! A friend of mine and I had such a lovely cruise together off the Western Islands. Poor Harville, sister! You know how much he wanted money: worse than myself. He had a wife. Excellent fellow! I shall never forget his happiness. He felt it all so much for her sake. I wished for him again next summer, when I had still the same luck in the Mediterranean.’” One cannot but feel, when one comes on such a conversation in Jane Austen’s novel, how perfectly she understood the details of her brothers’ lives. Her interest and sympathy were so great that we can almost hear Francis and Charles recounting experiences to their home circle, with a delicious dwelling on the dangers, for the sake of inward shudders, or “more open exclamations of pity and horror” from their hearers, with sidelong hits at the Admiralty, and with the true sailor’s love of, and pride in, the vessels he has commanded. CHAPTER VI THE PATROL OF THE MEDITERRANEAN