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Peace to his ashes! I have lived to see the grave close in succession over many of the few friends that I ever had. When I wandered about London streets, barefoot and half-naked, in the dead of a hard winter, just discharged from a hospital, and scarcely able to drag one foot after the other, my situation was comparatively enviable. I had no self-styled “friends” at my elbow, to mock me by talking about my “talents!” I knew that if I did not “bear a hand,” and ship myself off somewhere, I should be taken up on the vagrant act, and sent to Bridewell. Burns says,

“The fear o’ death’s a hangman’s whip,
That hauds the wretch in order.”

I should be loth to admit that the fear of Bridewell operated as a stimulus upon my mind, for it did not often occur to me; but I longed to enjoy once more

“the glorious privilege
Of being independent;”

and he, who is earning an honest livelihood by his own exertions, and can shave with cold water, is, in my estimation, more truly independent than he, whose father has bequeathed him half a million. Reader! you may as well pardon this digression first as last, for it is ten chances to one that you fall in with a whole fleet of them before you have sailed through these pages. If I do not moralize as I go along, I shall not have a chance to do it any where else.

As the afflicted father returned, with melancholy steps and slow, towards his quiet home, he could not forbear feeling an emotion of regret at the thought of having parted with his son in such a manner. “Had I but placed him,” he said to himself, “under the charge of the commander of one of our men-of-war, he would necessarily have been under such strict guardianship and discipline that his unfortunate habits might be entirely broken up; but now I fear that the liberty he will be allowed, or will take, in a merchant’s ship, will be his ruin.”

His home was more gloomy and sad that evening than it had ever been before; for though satisfied in the main with his own conduct, and hoping that the voyage would have most beneficial effects upon his son’s behavior and disposition, he regretted most bitterly the necessity of the measure, and felt the keenest anxiety as to its results. That son was destined never to return.

The ship in which he was embarked was driven much farther to the westward than is usually the case with outward-bound Indiamen, and encountered one of those tremendous gales of wind, known to seamen by the local name of pamperos, from their blowing off the immense pampas, or plains, that constitute a large portion of the province of Buenos Ayres, or, as it is now called, the Argentine Republic. The ship was dismasted, and with difficulty succeeded in reaching the harbor of Buenos Ayres to refit.

The city of Buenos Ayres was at that time, and I believe it is not much better now, a nest and rendezvous of pirates, that, under the cover of the republican flag, and the assumed character of men-of-war or privateers, with forged commissions, committed the most barefaced and abominable acts of piracy. The British cruisers, by capturing and hanging a good number of them, struck a most wholesome terror into the rest; but our government, with a fraternal affection for every mean and insignificant patch of barren sand-beach that called itself a republic, more worthy the sans-culotterie of the French revolution, than becoming a great and polished nation, permitted them to sell their prizes and refit in our ports. Buenos Ayres was then a point towards which all the scoundrels, and thieves, and murderers, of Europe and the United States, were radiating as to a common centre.