tually thought that, in his rage, he had thrust him overboard with his own hand. At the moment when the Commodore was assisted on shore, for he was still very ill, the coxswain, with a grin upon his countenance, took off his hat, and "supposed that they need not wait for his honour." For this ungracious hint, the Commodore knocked him with his iron hook fairly off the step into the water, and told them to wait where they were till the devil ordered them off. Then hobbling between a couple of midshipmen whom he had brought in the barge with him as a pair of living crutches, he repaired to the admiral's office. His reception there was cold in the extreme. The admiral had no charge to bring against the Commodore, yet he would very willingly grant him a court of inquiry on any point on which the Commodore himself might feel sore. This was to Sir Octavius wormwood and bitter aloes. He proudly declined his superior officer's offer with little thanks and a grim smile, and quite crestfallen, repaired to the principal hotel. "Yes I, even I, am superseded. Would it not be a wise action incontinently to go hang myself? Supersede me! Is it possible?" He had no sooner uttered these words, as he sank a martyr to physical and mental pain on the sofa, than a clerk entered with a cuttingly civil letter from the admiral, intimating to the Commodore, that, as under all the circumstances, it might be unpleasant to his feelings again to go on board the Terrific, the more especially as his successor had already joined, the admiral had taken upon himself to order all the Commodore's effects to be carefully landed and forwarded to him to his hotel. At the reception of this insult, the old Commodore's first impulse was to call the admiral out; but rightly judging, after a few minutes' reflection, that he was acting under instructions, he deliberately tore the letter into small pieces before the messenger's face, and burned them, telling him coolly, that he "might go from whence he came, as he had no answer to give the admiral." He then dismissed his midshipmen, ordering them to request the commanding officer to send his servants ashore, with the exception of his steward, who was to remain to superintend the disembarkation of his effects. He was then left to the solitude of an inn, and, with much more leisure than inclination, to think upon his nephew, his daughter, and his sister; and fully to comprehend how much misery to himself and to others he had created by the indulgence of his evil passions. The Commodore was not the person long to remain either passive or inactive. He said that he would give that day and the following night to repose. He did so. But this repose was, to him, the most active of all tortures. Notwithstanding the advice of a physician that he had called in, and that of his own naval surgeon, the next morning, he ordered a chaise and four, and proceeded to London, not to repair the evil of his contemptuous dismissal from command, for that he knew was irreparable, but to endeavour to trace out the influence which had brought it about. Clown. Truly, thou art damned, like an ill-roasted 1 egg, all on side. Corin. For not being at court? Your reason. never saw'st good manners; if thou never Now I, the chronicler of the passages in the life of the old Commodore, am, as I have before told my very good friend the reader, an ancient, a very ancient mariner; a little prosy or so, |