o this place and that
place to protect our own people, and their merchant vessels and their
commerce, from interference and injury."

"No, but I mean, in fighting. Do you think we shall ever have to send
them to fight again?"

"Probably."

"To fight whom?"

"That I don't know."

"Then why do you say 'probably'?"

"Because human nature remains what it was, and will no doubt do the
same work in the future that it has done from the beginning."

"Why is fighting part of that work, Uncle Ned?"

"Ah, why! Greed, which wants what is the right of others; pride, which
resents even a fancied interference with its own; anger, which cries
for revenge; these are the reasons."

Dolly looked very deeply serious.

"Why do you care so much about it, Dolly?" her aunt asked at length,
after a meditative pause of several minutes.

"I would be sorry to have the 'Achilles' go into battle," said Dolly;
and a perceptible slight shudder passed over her shoulders.

"Is the 'Achilles' so much to you, just because you have seen her?"

"No--" said Dolly thoughtfully; "it isn't the _ship;_ it's the people."

"Oh!--But what do you know of the people?"

"I saw a good many of them, Aunt Harry."

Politic Dolly! She had really seen only one. Yet she had no idea of
being politic; and why she did not say whom she had seen, and what
reason she had for being interested in him, I cannot tell you.

From that time Dolly's reading took a new turn. She sought out in the
bookcases everything that related to sailors and ships, and especially
naval warfare, and simply devoured it. The little Life of Lord Nelson,
by Southey, in two small calf-bound volumes, became her darling book.
Better than any novel, for it was _true_, and equal to any novel for
its varied, picturesque, passionate, stirring life story. Dolly read
it, till she could have given you at any time an accurate and detailed
account of any one of Nelson's great battles; and more than that, she
studied the geography of the lands and waters thereby concerned, and
where possible the topography also. I suppose the "Achilles" stood for
a model of all the ships in which successively the great commander
hoisted his flag; and if the hero himself did not take the form and
features of a certain American midshipman, it was probably because
there was a likeness of the subject of the Memoir opposite to the
title-page; and the rather plain, rather melancholy, rather feeble
traits of the English na