FLEEMIN&S GRANDFATHER xv 



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 con- 

 sisted, 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, l 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 Mr s. 

 was the work of a fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne fortune. 

 Frewen, a sister of Mrs. John. Twice married, first to her 

 cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the Court of Chancery, Bruns- 

 wick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and secondly to 

 Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and 

 being very rich she died worth about 60,OOOL, mostly in land 

 she was in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this 

 fortune hung before successive members of the Jenkin family 



