Surely the fairies must have been busy with suggestions at the birth and naming of this fighting seaman--great seaman and determined fighter, and withal a smack of romantic heroism about him, which is suggested at once by his Christian name--Fortunatus. No man with such a name, one is disposed to assume, could be an ordinary and commonplace sort of person, muddling along in the well-worn grooves of every-day life. This, of course, would be an absurd assumption; men have been named after all kinds of heroes, naval and military, statesmen, masters of the pen, and so on, and have fallen very far short--to put it mildly--of the aspirations of their fond and admiring parents. Wright's father was a master-mariner of Liverpool, of whom we are told that he had upon one occasion defended his ship most gallantly for several hours against two vessels of superior force--an exploit which is recorded upon his tombstone in St. Peter's churchyard, Liverpool, and from which we gather that he was either a privateer commander, or that his vessel, an ordinary trader, was armed for the purpose of defence. We do not know, however, why he named his son Fortunatus--we can only fall back upon the fairies; but a supplementary inscription upon the tombstone tells us that "Fortunatus Wright, his son, was always victorious, and humane to the vanquished. He was a constant terror to the enemies of his king and country"; and that is a very good sort of epitaph; moreover--unlike many such effusions, recording amiable or heroic characteristics of the dead which few had been able to recognise in the living--it is a true one. If not always victorious--and a probably true story, presently to be narrated, appears to point to one instance, at least, in which he and his antagonist parted indecisively--he was, at any rate, never beaten; and his conduct and character obtained for him, from a brave seaman and fighter of his own stamp, who sailed under him, the epithet, "that great hero, Fortunatus Wright"; the actual words, by the way, are "that great but unfortunate hero," and herein is an allusion, no doubt, to some very ungenerous treatment meted out to Wright by foreign authorities, and also to his unknown, and probably tragic, fate.