d,
Mrs. Jenkin mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance, and
horsewhipped the man with her own hand.

How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the
young midshipman is not very easy to conceive. Charles Jenkin was one of
the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural piety,
boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor
fashion, were in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age,
suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman;
he must have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for
his face and his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you
would have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that,
to this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though he
was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to the end no
genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to
be upright, gallant, affectionate, and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was
more knowing than one among a thousand; outside of that, his mind was
very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity that came near to
vacancy; and in the first forty years of his married life this want grew
more accentuated. In both families imprudent marriages had been the
rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more
unequal union. It was the Captain's good looks, we may suppose, that
gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for many years of
his life, he had to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his
incapacity, and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain
contempt. She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his;
after his retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor Captain, who
could never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner mumchance;
and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise
for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart
of his father. Yet it would be an error to regard this marriage as
unfortunate. It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a
beautiful and touching epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific
work and what (while time was) were of far greater value, the delightful
qualities of Fleeming Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile,
extravagant, generous to a fault, and far from brilliant, had given in
the father an extreme example of its h