right eye cut down; but the surgeons flatter
me I shall not entirely lose the sight. It confined me, thank God,
only one day, and at a time when nothing particular happened to be
doing." "You must not think my hurts confined me," he tells his wife;
"no, nothing but the loss of a limb would have kept me from my duty,
and I believe my exertions conduced to preserve me in this general
mortality." In his cheery letters, now, no trace is perceptible of the
fretful, complaining temper, which impaired, though it did not
destroy, the self-devotion of his later career. No other mistress at
this time contended with honor for the possession of his heart; no
other place than the post of duty before Calvi distracted his desires,
or appealed to his imagination through his senses. Not even Lord
Hood's report of the siege of Bastia, which here came to his
knowledge, and by which he thought himself wronged, had bitterness to
overcome the joy of action and of self-contentment.

Not many days were required, after the fall of Calvi, to remove the
fleet, and the seamen who had been serving on shore, from the
pestilential coast. Nelson seems to have been intrusted with the
embarkation of the prisoners in the transports which were to take them
to Toulon. He told his wife that he had been four months landed, and
felt almost qualified to pass his examination as a besieging general,
but that he had no desire to go on with campaigning. On the 11th of
August, the day after the delivery of the place, he was again on board
the "Agamemnon," from whose crew had been drawn the greatest
proportion of the seamen for the batteries. One hundred and fifty of
them were now in their beds. "My ship's company are all worn out," he
wrote, "as is this whole army, except myself; nothing hurts me,--of
two thousand men I am the most healthy. Every other officer is
scarcely able to crawl." Among the victims of the deadly climate was
Lieutenant Moutray, the son of the lady to whom, ten years before, he
had been so warmly attracted in the West Indies. Nelson placed a
monument to him in the church at San Fiorenzo.

On the 10th of August the "Agamemnon" sailed from Calvi, and after a
stop at San Fiorenzo, where Hood then was, reached Leghorn on the
18th. Now that the immediate danger of the siege was over, Nelson
admitted to his wife the serious character of the injury he had
received. The right eye was nearly deprived of sight,--only so far
recovered as to enable him