d
of leaping feet, the screams and oaths of battle, and, finally, the
triumphant shouts of English throats, and he knew that the Frenchman
was boarded. A last ringing British cheer told of the Frenchman's
surrender, and when he and his comrades were once more free to breathe
a draught of living air, after the deathly atmosphere under hatches,
Adrian learned that the victor was not a man-of-war, but a free-lance,
and conceived again a faint hope that deliverance might be at hand.

It was soon after this action, last of the fights that Adrian the
peace-lover had to pass through, and as the two swift vessels, now
sailing in consort, and under the same colours cleaved the waters,
bound for the Mersey, that a singular little drama took place on board
the _Espoir de Brest_.

Among the younger officers of the English privateer, who were left in
charge of the prize, was a lad upon whom Adrian's jaded eyes rested
with a feeling of mournful sympathy, so handsome was he, and so young;
so full of hope and spirits and joy of life, of all, in fact, of which
he himself had been left coldly bare. Moreover, the ring of the merry
voice, the glint of the clear eye awakened in his memory some fitful
chord, the key of which he vainly sought to trace.

One day, as the trim young lieutenant stood looking across the waters,
with his brave eager gaze that seemed to have absorbed some of the
blue-green shimmer of the element he loved, all unnoting the haggard
sailor at his elbow, a sudden flourish of the spy-glass which he, with
an eager movement, swung up to bear on some distant speck, sent his
watch and seals flying out of his fob upon the deck at Adrian's feet.

Adrian picked them up, and as he waited to restore them to their
owner, who tarried some time intent on his distant peering, he had
time to notice the coat and crest engraved upon one of the massive
trinkets hanging from their black ribbons.

When at last the officer lowered his telescope, Adrian came forward
and saluted him with a slight bow, all unconsciously as unlike the
average Jack Tar's scrape to his superior as can be well imagined:

"Am I not," he asked, "addressing in you, sir, one of the Cochranes of
the Shaws?"

The question and the tone from a common sailor were, of course, enough
to astonish the young man. But there must be more than this, as Adrian
surmised, to cause him to blush, wax angry, and stammer like a very
school-boy found at fault. Speaking with much s