n that fatal
action, in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his
motley crew, saw but a very small portion of the battle which ended so
fatally for us. It did not commence till nightfall. How well I remember
the sound of the enemy's gun, of which the shot crashed into our side in
reply to the challenge of our captain who hailed her! Then came a
broadside from us,--the first I had ever heard in battle."[G]

Ingham did not speak for a little while. None of us did. And when we
did, it was not to speak of Denis Duval, so much as of the friend we
lost, when we lost the monthly letter, or at least, Roundabout Paper,
from Mr. Thackeray. How much we had prized him,--how strange it was that
there was ever a day when we did not know about him,--how strange it was
that anybody should call him cynical, or think men must apologize for
him:--of such things and of a thousand more we spoke, before we came
back to Denis Duval.

But at last Fausta said,--"What do you mean, Fred, by saying you
remember Denis Duval?"

And I,--"Did you meet him at the Battle of Pavia, or in Valerius
Flaccus's Games in Numidia?" For we have a habit of calling Ingham "The
Wandering Jew."

But he would not be jeered at; he only called us to witness, that, from
the first chapter of Denis Duval, he had said the name was
familiar,--even to the point of looking it out in the Biographical
Dictionary; and now that it appeared Duval fought on board the Serapis,
he said it all came back to him. His grandfather, his mother's father,
was a "volunteer"-boy, preparing to be midshipman, on the Serapis,--and
he knew he had heard him speak of Duval!

Oh, how we all screamed! It was so like Ingham! Haliburton asked him if
his grandfather was not _best-man_ when Denis married Agnes. Fausta
asked him if he would not continue the novel in the "Cornhill." I said
it was well known that the old gentleman advised Montcalm to surrender
Quebec, interpreted between Cook and the first Kamehameha, piloted La
Perouse between the Centurion and the Graves in Boston harbor, and
called him up with a toast at a school-dinner;--that I did not doubt,
therefore, that it was all right,--and that he and Duval had sworn
eternal friendship in their boyhood, and now formed one constellation in
the southern hemisphere. But after we had all done, Ingham offered to
bet Newport for the Six that he would substantiate what he said. This is
by far the most tremendous wager in our littl