f France.

In the fierceness of actual fighting, Busaco has never been surpassed,
and seldom did the wounded and dying lie thicker on a battlefield than
where the hostile lines struggled together on that fatal September 27.
The _melee_ at some points was too close for even the bayonet to be
used, and the men fought with fists or with the butt-end of their
muskets. From the rush which swept Regnier's men down the slope the
Connaught Rangers came back with faces and hands and weapons literally
splashed red with blood. The firing was so fierce that Wellington,
with his whole staff, dismounted. Napier, however--one of the famous
fighting trio of that name, who afterwards conquered Scinde--fiercely
refused to dismount, or even cover his red uniform with a cloak. "This
is the uniform of my regiment," he said, "and in it I will show, or
fall this day." He had scarcely uttered the words when a bullet
smashed through his face and shattered his jaw to pieces. As he was
carried past Lord Wellington he waved his hand and whispered through
his torn mouth, "I could not die at a better moment!" Of such stuff
were the men who fought under Wellington in the Peninsula.

OF NELSON AND THE NILE

"Britannia needs no bulwarks,
No towers along the steep;
Her march is o'er the mountain waves,
Her home is on the deep.
With thunders from her native oak,
She quells the floods below,
As they roar on the shore
When the stormy winds do blow;
When the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow.

The meteor flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn,
Till danger's troubled night depart,
And the star of peace return.
Then, then, ye ocean warriors,
Our song and feast shall flow
To the fame of your name,
When the storm has ceased to blow;
When the fiery fight is heard no more,
And the storm has ceased to blow."
--CAMPBELL.

Aboukir Bay resembles nothing so much as a piece bitten out of the
Egyptian pancake. A crescent-shaped bay, patchy with shoals,
stretching from the Rosetta mouth of the Nile to Aboukir, or, as it is
now called, Nelson Island, that island being simply the outer point of
a sandbank that projects from the western horn of the bay. Flat
shores, grey-blue Mediterranean waters, two horns of land six miles
apart, that to the north projecting farthest and forming a low
island--this, ninety-eight years ago, was the scene of what