she might as well have waited. Kirby and Countess Fanny were at
Lucerne or Lausanne, or some such place, in Switzerland when the news
reached them, and Kirby, without losing an hour, laid hold of an English
clergyman of the Established Church and put him through the ceremony
of celebrating his lawful union with the beautiful young creature he
adored. And this he did, he said, for the world to guard his Fan in a
wider circle than his two arms could compass, if not quite so well.

So the Old Buccaneer was ever after that her lawful husband, and as his
wedded wife, not wedded to a fool, she was an example to her sex, like
many another woman who has begun badly with a light-headed mate. It
is hard enough for a man to be married to a fool, but a man is only
half-cancelled by that burden, it has been said; whereas a woman finds
herself on board a rudderless vessel, and often the desperate thing she
does is to avoid perishing! Ten months, or eleven, some say, following
the proclamation of the marriage-tie, a son was born to Countess Fanny,
close by the castle of Chillon-on-the-lake, and he had the name of
Chillon Switzer John Kirby given to him to celebrate the fact.

Two years later the girl was born, and for the reason of her first
seeing the light in that Austrian province, she was christened Carinthia
Jane. She was her old father's pet; but Countess Fanny gloried in the
boy. She had fancied she would be a childless woman before he gave sign
of coming; and they say she wrote a little volume of Meditations in
Prospect of Approaching Motherhood, for the guidance of others in a
similar situation.

I have never been able to procure the book or pamphlet, but I know
she was the best of mothers, and of wives too. And she, with her old
husband, growing like a rose out of a weather-beaten rock, proved she
was that, among those handsome foreign officers poorly remarkable for
their morals. Not once had the Old Buccaneer to teach them a lesson.
Think of it and you will know that her feet did not stray--nor did her
pretty eyes. Her heart was too full for the cravings of vanity. Innocent
ladies who get their husbands into scrapes are innocent, perhaps; but
knock you next door in their bosoms, where the soul resides, and ask
for information of how innocence and uncleanness may go together. Kirby
purchased a mine in Carinthia, on the borders of Styria, and worked it
himself. His native land displeased him, so that he would not have been