hty Highnesses who had only smelt the outside edge of
battle. She did rarely admire a valiant man. Old as Methuselah, he would
have made her kneel to him. She was all heart for a real hero.

The story goes, that Countess Fanny sent her husband to Captain Kirby,
at the emperor's request, to inquire his name; and on hearing it, she
struck her hands on her bosom, telling his Majesty he saw there the
bravest man in the king's dominions; which the emperor scarce crediting,
and observing that the man must be, then, a superhuman being to be
so distinguished in a nation of the brave, Countess Fanny related the
well-known tale of Captain Kirby and the shipful of mutineers; and how
when not a man of them stood by him, and he in the service of the first
insurgent State of Spanish America, to save his ship from being taken
over to the enemy,--he blew her up, fifteen miles from land: and so
he got to shore swimming and floating alternately, and was called Old
Sky-high by English sailors, any number of whom could always be had to
sail under Buccaneer Kirby. He fought on shore as well; and once he came
down from the tops of the Andes with a black beard turned white, and
went into action with the title of Kirby's Ghost.

But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a
ship foundering or splitting into the clouds. We are told that he never
forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval
captains: which is no doubt why in his old age he nursed a grudge
against his country.

Ours, I am sure, was the loss; and many have thought so since. He was
a mechanician, a master of stratagems; and would say, that brains will
beat Grim Death if we have enough of them. He was a standing example of
the lessons of his own MAXIMS FOR MEN, a very curious book, that fetches
a rare price now wherever a copy is put up for auction. I shudder at
them as if they were muzzles of firearms pointed at me; but they were
not addressed to my sex; and still they give me an interest in the
writer who would declare, that 'he had never failed in an undertaking
without stripping bare to expose to himself where he had been wanting in
Intention and Determination.'

There you may see a truly terrible man.

So the emperor being immensely taken with Kirby's method of preserving
discipline on board ship, because (as we say to the madman, 'Your
strait-waistcoat is my easy-chair') monarchs have a great love of
discipline, he begged Co