out. He sent a boat alongside and pressed
seven able seamen. I remarked it was hard on honest traders, but the
officer said they was fighting all creation and hadn't time to argue.
The next English frigate we escaped with no more than a shot in our
quarter. Then we was chased two days and a night by a French privateer,
firing between squalls, and the dirty little English ten-gun brig which
made him sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men.
That's how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men
pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close beside our
rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman had
hit us--and the Channel crawling with short-handed British cruisers.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it next time you grumble at the price of
tobacco!

'Well, then, to top it off, while we was trying to get at our leaks, a
French lugger come swooping at us out o' the dusk. We warned him to keep
away, but he fell aboard us, and up climbed his Jabbering red-caps. We
couldn't endure any more--indeed we couldn't. We went at 'em with all
we could lay hands on. It didn't last long. They was fifty odd to our
twenty-three. Pretty soon I heard the cutlasses thrown down and some one
bellowed for the sacri captain.

'"Here I am!" I says. "I don't suppose it makes any odds to you thieves,
but this is the United States brig BERTHE AURETTE."

'"My aunt!" the man says, laughing. "Why is she named that?"

'"Who's speaking?" I said. 'Twas too dark to see, but I thought I knew
the voice.

'"Enseigne de Vaisseau Estephe L'Estrange," he sings out, and then I was
sure.

'"Oh!" I says. "It's all in the family, I suppose, but you have done a
fine day's work, Stephen."

'He whips out the binnacle-light and holds it to my face. He was young
L'Estrange, my full cousin, that I hadn't seen since the night the smack
sank off Telscombe Tye--six years before.

'"Whew!" he says. "That's why she was named for Aunt Berthe, is it?
What's your share in her, Pharaoh?"

'"Only half owner, but the cargo's mine."

'"That's bad," he says. "I'll do what I can, but you shouldn't have
fought us." '"Steve," I says, "you aren't ever going to report our
little fall-out as a fight! Why, a Revenue cutter 'ud laugh at it!"

'"So'd I if I wasn't in the Republican Navy," he says. "But two of our
men are dead, d'ye see, and I'm afraid I'll have to take you
to the Prize Court at Le Havre."

'"Will