The west attic was a sort of lumber-room, in which was stored an extensive collection of miscellaneous articles which had survived their era of usefulness, but, either because they happened to be relics of former Saint Legers, or for some other equally sufficient reason, were deemed too valuable to be disposed of. The contents of this chamber could scarcely have proved uninteresting, even to a stranger, for in addition to several handsome pieces of out-of-date furniture--discarded originally in favour of the more modern, substantial mahogany article, and now permitted to remain in seclusion simply because of the _bizarre_ appearance they would present in conjunction with that same ponderous product of the nineteenth-century cabinet-makers' taste--there were to be found outlandish weapons, and curiosities of all kinds collected from sundry out-of-the-way spots in all quarters of the globe, to say nothing of the frayed and faded flags of silk or bunting that had been taken from the enemy at various times by one or another of the Saint Legers-- each one of which represented some especially hard-fought fight or deed of exceptional daring, a complete romance in itself--and the ponderous pistols with inlaid barrels and elaborately carved stocks, the bell-mouthed blunderbusses, and the business-like hangers, notched and dinted of edge, and discoloured to the hilt with dark, sinister stains, that hung here and there upon the walls, relics of dead and gone Saint Legers. To me, the only surviving descendant of that race of sturdy sea-heroes, the room and its contents had of course always proved absorbingly interesting; and never, even in my earliest childhood, had I been so delighted as when, on some fine, warm, summer day, I had succeeded in coaxing my mother up into this room and there extracted from her the legend attached to some flag or weapon. To do her justice she, poor soul, would never of her own free will have opened her lips to me on any such subject; but my father--a Saint Leger to the backbone, despite the fact that his susceptibilities had become refined and sensitive by the more gentle influences of modern teaching--felt none of the scruples that were experienced by his gentle, tender-hearted spouse, and seemed to consider it almost a religious duty that the latest of the Saint Legers should be so trained as to worthily sustain the traditions of his race. Not, it must be understood, that my father preserved the faintest trace of that unscrupulous, buccaneering propensity that was only too probably a strongly marked characteristic of the earlier Saint Legers; far from it; but it had evidently never occurred to him that it was even remotely possible that I should ever adopt any other profession than that of the sea, and, knowing from experience how indispensable to the sailor are the qualities of dauntless courage, patient, unflinching endurance, absolute self-reliance, and unswerving resolution, he had