Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 469

# "The Fugitive Sailor: The Romance of the Chesapeake" by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham

This serialized romantic adventure opens with Lieutenant Merton Granger, a wealthy Maryland naval officer, receiving his dying father's request to resign his commission and return home to assume control of Mistletoe Manor, a vast plantation on Chesapeake Bay. Granger sets sail homeward aboard the merchant brig Slipaway, where Captain Dana warns him of an American pirate lurking in their path. The narrative then backtracks to chronicle Granger's family history: his father's mysterious marriage to a Spanish-descended woman who bore young Merton before abandoning the family; the planter's subsequent decline into melancholy; and the arrival of relatives—the impoverished Dean family—at the manor. Particular attention centers on Lucille Gazzam, a fourteen-year-old ward of the Deans and heiress, whom the aging planter dotes upon. As Planter Granger approaches death, Lieutenant Granger races homeward to reach him before the end.