he fell, and helped to bear him to his plank of death, and came back
with orders not to speak, but work.

Then ensued that crowning effort of misplaced audacity--the attempt to
board and carry by storm the ship that still was Nelson's. The captain
of the Redoubtable saw through an alley of light, between walls of
smoke, that the quarter-deck of the Victory had plenty of corpses, but
scarcely a life upon it. Also he felt (from the comfort to his feet,
and the increasing firmness of his spinal column) that the heavy British
guns upon the lower decks had ceased to throb and thunder into his
own poor ship. With a bound of high spirits he leaped to a pleasing
conclusion, and shouted, "Forward, my brave sons; we will take the
vessel of war of that Nielson!"

This, however, proved to be beyond his power, partly through the
inborn absurdity of the thing, and partly, no doubt, through the quick
perception and former vocation of Robin Lyth. What would England have
said if her greatest hero had breathed his last in French arms, and a
captive to the Frenchman? Could Nelson himself have departed thus to a
world in which he never could have put the matter straight? The wrong
would have been redressed very smartly here, but perhaps outside his
knowledge. Even to dream of it awakes a shudder; yet outrages almost as
great have triumphed, and nothing is quite beyond the irony of fate.

But if free trade can not be shown as yet to have won for our country
any other blessing, it has earned the last atom of our patience and
fortitude by its indirect benevolence at this great time. Without free
trade--in its sweeter and more innocent maidenhood of smuggling--there
never could have been on board that English ship the Victory, a man,
unless he were a runagate, with a mind of such laxity as to understand
French. But Robin Lyth caught the French captain's words, and with two
bounds, and a holloa, called up Britons from below. By this time a swarm
of brave Frenchmen was gathered in the mizzen-chains and gangways
of their ship, waiting for a lift of the sea to launch them into the
English outworks. And scarcely a dozen Englishmen were alive within hail
to encounter them. Not even an officer, till Robin Lyth returned, was
there to take command of them. The foremost and readiest there was Jack
Anerley, with a boarder's pike, and a brace of ship pistols, and his
fine ruddy face screwed up as firm as his father's, before a big sale of
wheat "Come