at ran out on the muzzle of one of the
lower-deck guns and mewed plaintively, and one of the boats pulled
back, in the teeth of wind and sea, and rescued poor puss!

Of the eighteen British prizes, fourteen sank, were wrecked, burnt by
the captors, or recaptured; only four reached Portsmouth. Yet never
was the destruction of a fleet more absolutely complete. Of the
fifteen ships that escaped Trafalgar, four were met in the open sea on
November 4 by an equal number of British ships, under Sir Richard
Strahan, and were captured. The other eleven lay disabled hulks in
Cadiz till--when France and Spain broke into war with each other--they
were all destroyed. Villeneuve's great fleet, in brief, simply
vanished from existence! But Napoleon, with that courageous economy of
truth characteristic of him, summed up Trafalgar in the sentence: "The
storms occasioned to us the loss of a few ships after a battle
imprudently fought"! Trafalgar, as a matter of fact, was the most
amazing victory won by land or sea through the whole Revolutionary war.
It permanently changed the course of history; and it goes far to
justify Nelson's magnificently audacious boast, "The fleets of England
are equal to meet the world in arms!"

THE END

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