FLEEMING'S GRANDFATHER 7 



the actions with De Grasse. While at sea, Charles 

 kept a journal, and made strange archaic pilot- 

 book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of 

 which survive for the amusement of posterity. 

 He did a good deal of surveying, so that here we 

 may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of 

 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 

 Prothte, I find a code of signals graphically repre- 

 sented, 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. There- 

 upon 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 consisted, three were in his own house, and 

 two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) 



