eflection ought to curb this inclination, it
seems to do quite the contrary. This may be the reason why nobody as yet
(except Mary Anerley and Flamborough folk) seems even to have tried to
assign fair importance to Robin Lyth's share in this glorious encounter.
It is now too late to strive against the tide of fortuitous clamor,
whose deposit is called history. Enough that this Englishman came up,
with fifty more behind him, and carried all before him, as he was bound
to do.

CHAPTER LVII

MARY LYTH

Conquests, triumphs, and slaughterous glory are not very nice till they
have ceased to drip. After that extinction of the war upon the waves,
the nation which had won the fight went into general mourning. Sorrow,
as deep as a maiden's is at the death of her lover, spread over the
land; and people who had married their romance away, and fathered off
their enthusiasm, abandoned themselves to even deeper anguish at the
insecurity of property. So deeply had England's faith been anchored
into the tenacity of Nelson. The fall of the funds when the victory was
announced outspoke a thousand monuments.

From sires and grandsires Englishmen have learned the mood into which
their country fell. To have fought under Nelson in his last fight was a
password to the right hands of men, and into the hearts of women. Even
a man who had never been known to change his mind began to condemn
other people for being obstinate. Farmer Anerley went to church in his
Fencible accoutrements, with a sash of heavy crape, upon the first day
of the Christian year. To prove the largeness of his mind, he harnessed
the white-nosed horse, and drove his family away from his own parish, to
St. Oswald's Church at Flamborough, where Dr. Upround was to preach upon
the death of Nelson. This sermon was of the noblest order, eloquent,
spirited, theological, and yet so thoroughly practical, that seven
Flamborough boys set off on Monday to destroy French ships of war. Mary
did her very utmost not to cry--for she wanted so particularly to watch
her father--but nature and the doctor were too many for her. And when he
came to speak of the distinguished part played (under Providence) by a
gallant son of Flamborough, who, after enduring with manly silence evil
report and unprecious balms, stood forward in the breach, like Phineas,
and, with the sword of Gideon, defied Philistia to enter the British
ark; and when he went on to say that but for Flamborough's prowess on