"Captain Mugford was very fiercely attacked by 12 or 13 boats full of men, but he and his men exerted themselves with remarkable bravery, beat off the enemy, sunk several of their boats and killed a number of their men; it is supposed they lost 60 or 70. The intrepid Captain Mugford fell a little before the enemy left his schooner. He was run through with a lance while he was cutting off the hands of the pirates as they were attempting to board him, and it is said that with his own hands he cut off five pairs of theirs. No other man was killed or wounded on the Franklin."--_Kansas City Star._
Among the historical sketches penned by Miss Annie M. Lane for the American Journal of History, that touching the life of Governor John Clarke, received the highest award, and through the kindness of the author we are permitted to reproduce it.
"Why are the dead not dead? Who can undo What time has done? Who can win back the wind? Beckon lost music from a broken lute? Renew the redness of a last year's rose? Or dig the sunken sun-set from the deep?"
I sometimes think there are more interesting things and people under the ground than above it, yet we who are above it do not want to go below it to get acquainted with them, but if we can find out anything from the outside we enjoy it. In a previous article, I said there was no spot in Georgia so full of buried romance as Wilkes County, and no manuscript so fascinating as the musty and yellow old records of a hundred years ago, which lie unmolested in our courthouse, especially those of 1777.
One cannot but feel after reading these books that he has been face to face with the grand old gentlemen of Revolutionary days: the men who walked our streets with their ruffled shirts--three-cornered hats and dangling swords--yet so different are they in personality and character that the weaving together of their lives makes to me a grand and beautiful fabric, "a tapestry of reminiscent threads." Some rich, some dark and sombre in shade, making a background so fitting for the crimson and purple and gold--for the conspicuous, inflaming color of impetuous natures, toned down with characters as white and cool as the snowflakes which fall upon our Southern violets.