slowly moving line of the enemy pointed towards Cadiz. Nelson had
given his last orders. At his mainmast head was flying, fast belayed,
the signal, "Engage the enemy more closely." Nelson himself walked
quietly to and fro on the little patch of clear plank, scarcely seven
yards long, on the quarter-deck of the _Victory_, whence he could command
the whole ship, and he wore the familiar threadbare frock uniform coat,
bearing on the left breast four tarnished and lack-lustre stars. Then
came the incident of the immortal signal. "We must give the fleet," said
Nelson to Blackwood, "something by way of a fillip." After musing a
while, he said, "Suppose we signal, 'Nelson confides that every man will
do his duty'?" Some one suggested "England" instead of "Nelson," and
Nelson at once caught at the improvement. The signal-officer explained
that the word "confide" would have to be spelt, and suggested instead the
word "expects," as that was in the vocabulary. So the flags on the
masthead of the _Victory_ spelt out the historic sentence to the slowly
moving fleet. That the signal was "received with cheers" is scarcely
accurate. The message was duly acknowledged, and recorded in the log of
every ship, but perhaps not one man in every hundred of the actors at
Trafalgar knew at the moment that it had been sent. But the message
rings in British ears yet, across ninety years, and will ring in the ears
of generations yet unborn.

Nelson led his column on a somewhat slanting course into the fight. He
was bent on laying himself alongside the flagship of the enemy, and he
knew that this must be one of the three great line-of-battle ships near
the huge _Santissima Trinidad_. But there was no sign to show which of
the three carried Villeneuve. At half-past twelve the ships upon which
the _Victory_ was moving began to fire single shots at her slowly
drifting hulk to discover whether she was within range. The seventh of
these shots, fired at intervals of a minute or so, tore a rent through
the upper canvas of the _Victory_--a rent still to be seen in the
carefully preserved sail. A couple of minutes of awful silence followed.
Slowly the _Victory_ drifted on its path, and then no fewer than eight of
the great ships upon which the _Victory_ was moving broke into such a
tempest of shot as perhaps never before was poured on a single ship. One
of the first shots killed Scott, Nelson's secretary; another cut down
eight marines stan