Allen Francis Gardiner, the fifth son of a Berkshire squire, was born in 1794. He was a born sailor, and became a midshipman before the end of the great war of the French revolution; but the only naval action in which he was engaged was against the American vessel _Essex_, which was captured by his ship, the _Phoebe_, off Valparaiso. Allen Gardiner had been carefully brought up by a good mother, but her death in his early youth cast him loose and left him without any influence to keep up serious impressions. He drifted into carelessness and godlessness, though at times some old remembrance, roused by danger or by a comrade's death, would sting him sharply. Once, feeling ashamed of having forgotten the very words of Scripture, he made up his mind to buy a Bible, and then was so full of false shame that he waited about in the street till the shop should be empty, and then only thought how odd his demand must seem to the bookseller. Most likely this was at Portsmouth, for he had there met a lady who had been with his mother at her death, and had given him a narrative of her last days, which his father had written, but from some sense of want of sympathy had withheld from the son. The friend judged him better. The copy in his own handwriting bears the date, "Portsmouth, November 18, 1818," and therewith was a little Bible with the same date written in it. For two years, however, this produced no effect; but in 1820, when at Penang, as a lieutenant in the _Dauntless_, Allen received a letter of grave reproof from his father, and one of warm kindness and expostulation from the same lady, his mother's friend, together with some books. Nothing would have seemed more hopeless than the chance that a letter from a religious old lady would make an impression on a dashing young naval officer, and yet Allen Gardiner always considered this as the turning-point of his life, and connected it with his mother's prayers.