1830.] [ 633 ] 



THE DEMON SHIP THE PIRATE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN. 



IT has of late been much the fashion with writers of celebrity to 

 choose Pirates for their heroes, insomuch that many of our youth, espe- 

 cially of the female sex, attach an idea of romantic grandeur to the very 

 word pirate ; and I once knew a young lady who, during a sail up the 

 Mediterranean, was kept in a state of delirious excitement by the expec- 

 tation, I mean the hope, of our all being eventually captured by a Greek 

 corsair. Not one, however, of these fascinating marauders made his 

 appearance, and we were doomed, in visitation, I suppose, for our sins, 

 to have an unmolested passage, and a safe disembarkation. To console 

 my young friend under her acute disappointment, I shewed her a little 

 MS. which had been bequeathed to me by a relative, a Colonel Fran- 

 cillon, who died before pirates came into fashion, and who would as 

 soon have thought of seeking a hero in the Newgate Calendar, among 

 footpads or housebreakers, as among the daring robbers of the ocean. 

 It became evident that the young lady was sufficiently struck by the 

 contents of the manuscript to be perfectly willing to take another sail 

 over the Mediterranean, in a quiet way, without the interference of any 

 robber chief to give piquance to the voyage. This calmed admiration 

 of my young friend for gentlemen-thieves, induced me to afford the 

 colonel's story an opportunity for more enlarged conversion of robber- 

 lovers. I therefore give it to society with all its imperfections on its 

 head. It will be seen ere the conclusion of the tale, that no one can 

 better than my self vouch for the truth of the circumstances there brought 

 together ; and it would be too trite to remark, that events often occur 

 in real life which in fiction would be regarded as gross violations of all 

 probability. 



I WAS the only son of a widowed mother, who, though far from 

 affluent, was not pennyless; you will naturally suppose, therefore, 

 I was a most troublesome, disagreeable, spoiled child. Such I 

 might have been, but for the continual drawback on all my early 

 gratifications, which my maternal home presented in the shape of an 

 old dowager countess, a forty-ninth cousin of my mother's. This lady 

 thought that she handsomely purchased a residence in our family by 

 her gracious acknowledgment of this semi-hundredth degree of consan- 

 guinity. I believe she had been banished from the mansion of her 

 eldest son because her talents for reproof, and his ideas of his own 

 impeccability, in nowise harmonized to produce domestic felicity. At 

 all events, she became an omnipresent Marplot on mine. Whatever 

 I was doing, wherever I was going, there was she reproving, rebuking, 

 exhorting, and all to save me from idling, or drowning, or quarrelling,, 

 or straying, or a hundred etceteras. I grew up, went to school, to 

 college finally, into the army, and with it to Ireland ; and had the sa- 

 tisfaction, at five-and-twenty, to hear the dowager say I was good for 

 nothing. She was of a somewhat malicious disposition, and perhaps I 

 did not well to make her my enemy. At this time I had the offer of a 

 good military appointment to India, and yet I hesitated to accept it. 

 There was in my native village a retired Scotch officer, for whom I had 

 conceived a strong attachment. His daughter I had known and loved 

 from childhood, and when this gave place to womanhood, my affection 

 changed in kind while it strengthened in degree. Margaret Cameron 



M.M. New Series. Vo*. X, No. 60. 4 L 



