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THE

YOUNG MAROONERS.

CHAPTER I.

THE COMPANY AND THEIR EMBARCATION.

ON Saturday, the 21st of August, 1830, a small but beautiful brig left the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, bound for Tampa Bay, Florida. On board were nine passengers; Dr. Gordon, his three children, Robert, Mary, and Frank; his sister's son, Harold McIntosh, and four servants.

Dr. Gordon was a wealthy physician, who resided, during the winter, upon the seaboard of Georgia, and during the summer, upon a farm in the mountains of that beautifully varied and thriv ing State. His wife was a Carolinian, from the neighbourhood of Charleston. Anna Gordon, his sister, married a Col. McIntosh, who, after residing for twelve years upon a plantation near the city of Montgomery, in Alabama, died, leaving

his widow with three children, and an encumbered estate. Soon after her widowhood, Dr. Gordon paid her a visit, for the two-fold purpose of condolence and of aiding in the settlement of her affairs. She was so greatly pleased with the gentlemanly bearing and the decided intelligence of Robert, who on this occasion accompanied his father, that she requested the privilege of placing her son Harold under her brother's care, until some other arrangement could be made for his education. Dr. Gordon was equally prepossessed with the frank manners and manly aspect of his nephew, and it was with peculiar pleasure that he acceded to the request. Harold had been with his uncle about a month previous to the period at which this history begins.

Mrs. Gordon was a woman of warm affections and cultivated mind, but of feeble constitution. She had been the mother of five children; but, during the infancy of the last, her health exhibited so many signs of decay as to convince her husband that the only hope of saving her life was to seek for her, during the ensuing winter, a climate even more bland than that in which she had

her girlhood.

spent

Tampa Bay is a military post of the United States. Dr. Gordon had formerly visited it, and was so delighted with its soft Italian climate, and with the wild beauty of its shores, that he had

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