t was in Buckner's own ship, the _Prothee_, 64, that
the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days of Rodney's war, when
the _Prothee_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of
Barbadoes, and was "materially and distinguishedly engaged" in both the
actions with De Grasse. While at sea, Charles kept a journal, and made
strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of
which survive for the amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of
surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning
of Fleeming's education as an engineer. What is still more strange,
among the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room
of the _Prothee_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for
all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the man
to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned
farmer, a trade he was to practise on a large scale; and we find him
married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not
appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
other it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with
his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were
in his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas)
he appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.
He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and
Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. "Lord Rokeby, his
neighbour, called him kinsman," writes my artless chronicler, "and
altogether life was very cheery." At Stowting his three sons, John,
Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all
born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is through the
report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at
these confused passages of family history.

In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a
fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to