d 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
steadily done his utmost to cultivate those qualities in me; and his
stories were invariably so narrated as to illustrate the value and
desirability of one or another of them.

On the present occasion, however, my thoughts on entering the room were
intent upon a subject but remotely connected with the valiant
achievements of my ancestors; and I lost no time in collecting together
in one corner every article, big or little, that still remained of the
possessions of Richard Saint Leger. There were not many of them: his
sea-chest, containing a somewhat limited wardrobe, including th