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.