"Dont't libel the property, brother Broadbrim,"
exclaimed the flushed auctioneer; "and
you, gentlemen, let me requisition you to throw
aside your supineness, and bid for the lot as
becomes the land of enlightenment. No advance?
I wish I had her at New York, I do! I wish
she were lying off Brooklyn, and then the force
of competition would——'

"Never mind the force of competition, Mr.
Kettering. You're longer-winded than a
Congress-man. Call the next lot, mister, and knock
this'n down to the cap., can't you? We've
listened to enough bunkum, about that tarnation
toy-shop schooner."

Mr. Kettering made one more appeal. He
begged of the audience not to "give the
Britisher a triumph," not to "let this gorgeous
yacht, comparable to the gilded galley of the
Europian princess Cleopatra the Great go
out of the country;" but, finally, he rapped down
the hammer of fate.

"Cap., she's yours."

I was the captain. Attracted by certain
glowing advertisements in the American and
Canadian papers, I had come across to Buffalo
to view the yacht and be present at the sale;
and now I was the undisputed owner of the
schooner Constellation, a craft fit for yachting,
and fit for nothing else. Her lines were graceful
and good, and she lay like a duck upon the
water, with her taper masts and bright paint:
a strange contrast to the uglier and more
serviceable vessels on the lake. But her tonnage
was trifling, her speed by far surpassed her power
of carrying freight, and there was some foundation
for the scorn with which the traders of
Buffalo regarded her. For wafting flour-barrels,
wheat, Indiana cheese, and Illinois apples, eastward,
and of bearing European goods and Lowell
cotton-prints, westward—she was as unfit as a
racehorse for ploughing. A melancholy story,
which I heard in after-days, but of which I then
knew but little, attached to her. She had been
built and decorated for a young Buffalo exquisite,
the heir of a wealthy townsman, who had acquired
costly habits in New York. By herself, the yacht
might have been all very well, and might even have
kept her feather-brained owner out of mischief;
but, unluckily, young Breckett had a taste for
play, and preferred écarté and lansquenet, with
fashionably high stakes, to the cribbage and
"poker," for quarter dollars, of his native
province. When a man seeks his own ruin,
whether in the Old World or in the New, he
seldom has long to wait. Two gamblers from
the Empire City visited Buffalo in the course of
a professional tour, became acquainted with the
younger Breckett, and emptied his pockets as
the price of their intimacy. To replenish his
purse and have his "revenge," the silly young
man was tempted to borrow the contents of his
father's cash-box, in the idle hope of replacing
the money he had taken when luck should turn.
The stolen dollars and golden eagles brought with
them no change of fortune; they soon chinked
in the purses of the sharpers; and the wretched
dupe ended his desperate folly by blowing his
brains out. Thus it occurred that the pretty
schooner, almost new from the builder's hands,
was brought to the hammer at Buffalo mart,
and sold for a fraction of her original cost.

I was then a raw emigrant; not one of
those emigrants who cross the Atlantic to
conjure fortune with axe and ploughshare, but
one of the army of small capitalists. The
price of my captain's commission in the
Hundred and Ninth, added to a small sum
in the funds, sufficed to purchase a good
many acres of land in West Canada, mostly
overgrown with rough wood, but of fair natural
fertility. There was a good storehouse on the
"farm," as I modestly called what, in respect
to acreage at least, was worthy to be dubbed
an estate; and though I had been more lucky
than shrewd in my selection, old settlers told
me that I had secured a remunerative bargain.
Summer came round, and events proved that the
old settlers were right. There were some
"bottoms" of fine alluvial land, that gave a first-rate
wheat crop with scanty trouble. There were
good natural meadows for hay, the proportion
of barren ground was below the average, and a
friendly creek afforded water-carriage for my
felled timber to the broad sheet of Lake Erie.
If not an experienced farmer, I was no sluggard;
my head man was honest and skilful; and I
found myself thriving beyond my first hopes.
Then, I had leisure time on my hands; I had
some money to spare; I saw and was attracted
by the advertisements of the intended sale of
the Constellation; and I went over to Buffalo to
examine the much-lauded vessel. What I saw
of her pleased me greatly. She was swift and
handsome, her sails, cables, anchors, and cordage
—everything, from the stewpans of the cook's
caboose, to the boats towing astern—was in first-
rate order. She would not need repairs for a
long time, and a very small crew would
suffice to handle her. I was born on the banks
of Southampton Water, and was passionately
fond of boating from a boy. My father had
owned a yacht, and I had been used to knocking
about the Solent and the Channel at an early
age; while, in the transports that had the
honour of conveying our regiment to India,
Malta, and Bermuda, I had kept watch and
watch, and had added to my stock of sea-lore.
I was, therefore, fairly qualified to be a
commander of a well-found craft in the fresh-water
navigation of a lake: although Erie, shallowest
of the American inland seas, is liable to tempests
of peculiar fury.

I bought the Constellation, paid for her,
hired a couple of boatmen out of work to
help me across with her, and left Buffalo
under easy canvas: steering my new
purchase in person, and feeling a pardonable pride
in the elegant appearance and good
behaviour of my little vessel. Half Buffalo
sauntered to the quays to see us off. We had the
topsails set, the foresail clued up, and the large
mainsail gently swelling to the light air that
turned the glittering sheet of water into frosted
silver. Many duller sailers were crawling