The two Turkish frigates lay at a little distance, like logs on the face of the water; unable to move from the relative situations into which they had drifted during the cessation of the battle, and too much separated to afford each other any assistance. It was therefore with as much dismay as astonishment, that they beheld the Euphrasia approach one of them, take up a raking position within pistol shot of her, and open a well-directed fire. This was but feebly answered by the Turks, who, little expecting a renewal of the combat before daylight, were not prepared to fire more than one or two of their stern chasers with any effect. Stubborn, however, and desperate to the last, they continued to fight with musketry, till their decks were heaped with dead and dying; when, their captain, losing all hope of escape, snatched up a lighted match, and brandishing it in a species of mad triumph, ran with it to fire the magazine. At this point the frantic valour of this remnant of a crew forsook them: they cut down their captain ere he could effect his desperate purpose, cried for quarter, and struck their colours.
Edmund now made sail towards the other frigate. She had already lost the greater part of her crew, being the vessel which had boarded: she could therefore make scarcely any resistance; and, seeing the fate of her consort, she struck her colours, after firing but one or two guns.
The object for which Edmund had been detached being thus happily accomplished, he rejoined Lord Fitz-Ullin as quickly as possible, taking with him his two disabled prizes; both, notwithstanding, valuable frigates. He was received, as may well be imagined, with loud cheers from the crews of all the vessels in the fleet.
Thus did our hero, in less than five years from the date of his last visit to his friends at Lodore, see himself, at the early age of four-and-twenty, risen to the rank of post-captain, possessed of prize-money to a large amount, and crowned with laurels so gallantly won, as to render his name known and respected in every part of the world to which a newspaper could find its way.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
“The feast is smoking wide.”
“Here, Alice, bairn, here, tack it fray me; and mind ye, mack it light and flecky, like to the leaves o’ a reading buke,” cried our old friend, Mrs. Smyth; who stood up to her elbows in flour, and up to her eyes in business, in the housekeeper’s room at Lodore House; “and mind ye dinna pit the raspberry in ’till the puffs be mair nor half baked; or it ’ill be bubbling o’er, and spoiling the edges o’ the pastry. Bless me weel, sich a fuss! Ye mun mind a’ the’e thing soon bairn. I’m no used till them noo, and, indeed, I’m getting auld. Nell, woman! rin, will ye, till the ice-hoose, there’s a canny wife! and see if yon jelly will turn oot yet. What will come o’ me, if the jelly will no turn oot affoor dinner-time! Maister Donald,” said she, to the butler, who had just entered, and who was a countryman of her own, being one of the old Scotch establishment, “hoo cum ye on? As for my auld head, it’s fairly bothered: we are no used to such doings o’ late years, Maister Donald!”
“Vara true, Mrs. Smyth,” said the butler, “it’s thirteen years, I believe, sin we have had to say, reg’lar coompany in this hoose.”