"What nonsense you talk, Nat," his eldest sister Mary said. "I thought by this time, now you are a lieutenant, you would have become quite stiff, and would expect a good deal of deference to be paid to you."
"I can't say that you have been a good correspondent, Nat," his mother said. "You wrote very seldom, and then said very little of what you had been doing."
"Well, mother, there are not many post-offices in Hayti, and I should not have cared to trust any letters to them if there had been. There is the advantage, you see, that there is much more to tell you now than if I had written to you before. You don't get papers very regularly here, I think?"
"No, we seldom see a London paper, and the Bath papers don't tell much about anything except the fashionable doings there."
"Then I have several pieces of news to tell you. Here is a Gazette, in which you will see that a certain Nathaniel Glover brought into Portsmouth last week a French thirty-six-gun frigate which he had captured, and in another part of the Gazette you will observe that the same officer has been confirmed in the acting rank of commander, and has been appointed to the Spartane, which is to be recommissioned at once. Therefore you see, sisters, you will in future address me as captain."
There was a general exclamation of surprise and delight.
"That is what it was," the rector said, "that Dr. Miles was talking to me about yesterday in Yeovil. He said that the London papers were full of the news that a French frigate had been captured by a little ten-gun brigantine, and had been brought home by the officer who had taken her, who was, he said, of the same name as mine. He said that it was considered an extraordinarily gallant action."
"We shall be as proud as peacocks," Lucy, the youngest girl, said.
"Now as to my news," he went on. "Doubtless that was important, but not so important as that which I am now going to tell you. At the present moment there is at Yeovil a gentleman and lady, together with their daughter, the said daughter being, at the end of a reasonable time, about to become my wife, and your sister, girls."
The news was received with speechless surprise.