the Revolution, and was much pleased when
we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account
agreed with the written.

"Oh," he said, "I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my
ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide
awake, and likes to know everything that's going on. Oh, I know!"

He told us the story of the wreck of the Franklin, which took place
there the previous spring: how a boy came to his house early in the
morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a vessel
in distress; and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast, and then
walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there,
having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She was on the
bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on
the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no assistance on
account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea running. There
were the passengers all crowded together in the forward part of the
ship, and some were getting out of the cabin-windows and were drawn on
deck by the others.

"I saw the captain get out his boat," said he; "he had one little one;
and then they jumped into it, one after another, down as straight as an
arrow. I counted them. There were nine. One was a woman, and she jumped
as straight as any of them. Then they shoved off. The sea took them
back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six
still clinging to the boat: I counted them. The next wave turned the
boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever came
ashore alive. There were the rest of them all crowded together on the
forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. They had seen
all that happened to the boat. At length a heavy sea separated the
forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst
breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were
left, but one woman."

He also told us of the steamer Cambria's getting aground on his shore a
few months before we were there, and of her English passengers who
roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from the
high hill by the shore "the most delightsome they had ever seen," and
also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the
ponds. He spoke of these travellers, with their purses full of guineas,
just as our Provincial fat