e French gunners,
and begged him to move from it. Somebody at the table said, "I hope
you did, sir?" "I really forget," said the Duke, "but I know I thought
it very good advice at the time."

Only twice during the day did Wellington show any trace of remembering
what may be called his personal interest in the fight. Napoleon had
called him "a Sepoy general." "I will show him to-day," he said, just
before the battle began, "how a Sepoy general can defend himself." At
night, again, as he sat with a few of his surviving officers about him
at supper, his face yet black with the smoke of the fight, he
repeatedly leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hands convulsively,
and exclaiming aloud, "Thank God! I have met him. Thank God! I have
met him." But Wellington's mood throughout the whole of the battle was
that which befitted one of the greatest soldiers war has ever produced
in the supreme hour of his country's fate. The Duke was amongst the
leading files of the British line as they pushed the broken French
Guard down the slope, and some one begged him to remember what his life
was worth, and go back. "The battle is won," said Wellington; "my life
doesn't matter now." Dr. Hulme, too, has told how he woke the Duke
early in the morning after the fight, his face grim, unwashed, and
smoke-blackened, and read the list of his principal officers--name
after name--dead or dying, until the hot tears ran, like those of a
woman, down the iron visage of the great soldier.

As Napoleon in the gathering darkness galloped off the field, with the
wreck and tumult of his shattered army about him, there remained to his
life only those six ignoble years at St. Helena. But Wellington was
still in his very prime. He was only forty-six years old, and there
awaited him thirty-seven years of honoured life, till, "to the noise of
the mourning of a mighty nation," he was laid beside Nelson in the
crypt of St. Paul's, and Tennyson sang his requiem:--

"O good grey head, which all men knew,
O voice from which their omens all men drew,
O iron nerve, to true occasion true;
O fall'n at length that tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew."

THE NIGHT ATTACK OFF CADIZ

"'Captain,' they cry, 'the fight is done,
They bid you send your sword!'
And he answered, 'Grapple her stern and bow.
They have asked for the steel. They shall have it now;
Out cutlasses, and board!'"