ry's battles, my place as heir might
readily be supplied by my next brother, who highly applauded my
determination. To do him justice, however, I am very certain that he
had no selfish motives in so doing; indeed, his great wish was to be
allowed to go also, and share my fortunes.

The matter settled, while my father wrote to our county member to beg
that he would look out for a good ship for me, I wrote to my tailor,
directing him to make me a uniform without delay, and to arrange my
outfit. Young gentlemen with large expectations are as fond of fine
clothes as are sometimes poor ones; and on the day my uniform arrived,
and during three months or so afterwards, I took every opportunity of
wearing it in public. Young as I was, I was made a good deal of in the
neighbourhood, and it thus became pretty widely known that I was about
to go to sea; or, as I told people, with no small amount of vanity, to
become an officer in the navy.

I believe that very few young gentlemen ever went to sea with a better
kit than I had when I at length was directed to join the _Ianthe_
frigate, of forty guns, commanded by Captain Hansome. I found that I
was not thought nearly so much of on board as I had been in our county,
at those houses where five or six flaxen-haired young ladies formed part
of the family. I remember that Jack wrote me word, however, that they
had begun to make fully as much of him on one occasion when it was
supposed that war would break out, and on another when it was reported
that the frigate had been sent to the West Indies; but that might have
been only his fancy.

My father was unwell, so the steward took me to Portsmouth, and he, not
liking the look of the somewhat foam-covered Solent Sea, sent me off
under the charge of a waterman in a shore boat to the ship, which lay at
Spithead. We had a dead beat, and I was very sick before we got
half-way across. The first lieutenant was on deck as I crawled up the
side.

"You have not been to sea before," he observed, glancing at my
woe-begone countenance, and then at the numberless articles handed up
after me. "A pity your friends hadn't any one to tell them that a
frigate has no lumber-room for the stowage of empty boxes. Boy! send
Mr Owen here."

The lieutenant did not wait for an answer, and I stood expecting some
other remark to be made to me, but he did not deign to address me again.
While looking about and wondering at the strange appearance of the
fr