bout to be given, the _Didon's_ flag fluttered
reluctantly down; she had struck!

The toils of the _Phoenix_, however, were not even yet ended. The ship
she had captured was practically a wreck, its mainmast tottering to its
fall, while the prisoners greatly exceeded in numbers their captors.
The little _Phoenix_ courageously took her big prize in tow, and laid
her course for Plymouth. Once the pair of crippled frigates were
chased by the whole of Villeneuve's fleet; once, by a few chance words
overheard, a plot amongst the French prisoners for seizing the
_Phoenix_ and then retaking the _Didon_ was detected--almost too
late--and thwarted. The _Phoenix_, and her prize too, reached
Gibraltar when a thick fog lay on the straits, a fog which, as the
sorely damaged ships crept through it, was full of the sound of signal
guns and the ringing of bells. The Franco-Spanish fleet, in a word, a
procession of giants, went slowly past the crippled ships in the fog,
and never saw them!

On September 3, however, the _Phoenix_ safely brought her hard-won and
stubborn-guarded prize safely into Plymouth Sound.

The fight between the two ships was marked by many heroic incidents.
During the action the very invalids in the sick-bay of the _Phoenix_
crept from their cots and tried to take some feeble part in the fight.
The purser is not usually part of the fighting staff of a ship, but the
acting purser of the _Phoenix_, while her captain was in the
smoke-filled cabin below, trying to rig up a gun to bear on the
_Didon_, took charge of the quarter-deck, kept his post right opposite
the brazen mouth of the great carronade we have described, and, with a
few marines, kept down the fire. A little middy had the distinction of
saving his captain's life. The _Didon's_ bowsprit was thrust, like the
shaft of a gigantic lance, over the quarter of the _Phoenix_, and a
Frenchman, lying along it, levelled his musket at Captain Baker, not
six paces distant, and took deliberate aim. A middy named Phillips,
armed with a musket as big as himself, saw the levelled piece of the
Frenchman; he gave his captain an unceremonious jostle aside just as
the Frenchman's musket flashed, and with almost the same movement
discharged his own piece at the enemy. The French bullet tore off the
rim of Captain Baker's hat, but the body of the man who fired it fell
with a splash betwixt the two ships into the water. Here was a story,
indeed, for a middy to tell, t