d long we strove our barque to save,
But all our striving was in vain."--LOWE.

I was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October
1802, in the low, long house built by my great-grandfather the
buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date
several months ere the completion of my third year; but, like those of
the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character.
I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's
little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft
yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant
that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red
colour. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the
little duckling; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been
a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms.
I have a distinct recollection, too,--but it belongs to a later
period,--of seeing my ancestor, old John Feddes the buccaneer, though he
must have been dead at the time considerably more than half a century. I
had learned to take an interest in his story, as preserved and told in
the antique dwelling which he had built more than a hundred years
before. To forget a love disappointment, he had set out early in life
for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows,
he succeeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons; and
then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much
inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately became his wife. There
were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold
of my imagination; for I used over and over to demand its repetition;
and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scrabble his
initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when
playing all alone at the stair-foot--for the inmates of the house had
gone out--something extraordinary had caught my eye on the landing-place
above; and looking up, there stood John Feddes--for I somehow
instinctively divined that it was none other than he--in the form of a
large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue greatcoat He seemed
to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency; but I was
sadly frightened; and for years after, when passing through the dingy,
ill-lighted room out of which I inferred he had come, I used to fe