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She is the child of destiny, with her sceptre extended over the seas which bind to her the great Orient. When John C. Calhoun was Secretary of State he laid his finger on the map where San Francisco stands now, and said: "There, when this Bay comes into our possession, will spring up the great rival of New York."

Such an one was the man Cosh, and that Teach, surnamed Blackbeard, of whom we hear too much to-day. But, on the whole, we of Virginia suffered not at all from these gentlemen of fortune, and piracy, though the common peril of the seas, entered but little into the estimation of the merchants.

Now we must leave out much more that might be said, and many stories that might be told, about elves, and fairies, and nixes, or water spirits, and swan maidens who become women when they lay aside their swan dresses to bathe; and mermaids and seal maidens, who used to live in the islands of the North seas.

The French squadron was too weak to risk a fight with an English fleet; it comprised only four ships of war, two transports, and a few smaller vessels, carrying about 1,800 troops. The ships were under the command of Admiral Linois, who was destined to be the terror of our merchantmen in eastern seas.

"Fishing lines there Idlers, fishing lines," said I; and in a minute there were forty of them down over the side. In Europe, fish in their shapes partake of the sedate character of the people who inhabit the coasts of the seas or rivers in which they swim at least I think so.

I've bin tattooed by the New Zealanders, and I've danced with the Hottentots, and ate puppy dogs with the Chinese, and fished whales in the North Seas, and run among the ice near the South Pole, and fowt with pirates, and done service on boord of men-o'-war and merchantmen, and junks, and bumboats; but I never," concluded Gurney, looking round with a sigh, "I never came for to be located on a sandbank in the middle of the ocean."

To the distinguished representatives of the commercial interests of the Empire, whom I have the pleasure of seeing here to-day, I venture to allude to the impression which seemed generally to prevail among their brethren across the seas, that the old country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors.

We hoisted the flag that sees an enemy in every other flag, and for three years the Storm scourged these seas from Cape Horn to Sands' Head. When ships, sent in pursuit of us, were searching along the west coast, we were making war on commerce on the coast of China.

Any one who has ever had the good fortune to read a little book of verse entitled "From the Eastern Seas," by Yone Noguchi, a young Japanese, will at once pronounce them a beautiful and perhaps perfect example of verse that may be correctly labeled "cosmic."

It was a sort of general trading-ship, stopping at the different islands in the South Seas, and had been a year out from home, where the kind woman had left her little ones; she cried over their photographs to me.