ass of grog, which Swinburne
tossed off, and as he finished it, sighed deeply as if in sorrow that
there was no more. Having stowed away the tumbler in one of the cap
stern holes for the present, we sat down upon a coil of ropes under the
weather bulwarks, and Swinburne, replacing his quid of tobacco,
commenced as follows:--

"Well, Mr Simple, as I told you before, old Jervis started with all his
fleet for Cape St. Vincent. We lost one of our fleet--and a
three-decker, too--the _St. George_; she took the ground, and was
obliged to go back to Lisbon; but we soon afterwards were joined by five
sail of the line, sent out from England, so that we mustered fifteen
sail in all. We had like to lose another of our mess, for d'ye see, the
old _Culloden_ and _Colossus_ fell foul of each other, and the
_Culloden_ had the worst on it, but Troubridge, who commanded her, was
not a man to shy his work, and ax to go in to refit, when there was a
chance of meeting the enemy--so he patched her up somehow or another,
and reported himself ready for action the very next day. Ready for
action he always was, that's sure enough, but whether his ship was in a
fit state to go into action, is quite another thing. But as the sailors
used to say in joking, he was a _true bridge_, and you might trust to
him; which meant as much as to say, that he knew how to take his ship
into action, and how to fight her when he was fairly in it. I think it
was the next day that Cockburn joined us in the _Minerve_, and he
brought Nelson along with him, with the intelligence that the Dons had
chased him, and that the whole Spanish fleet was out in pursuit of us.
Well, Mr Simple, you may guess we were not a little happy in the
_Captain_, when Nelson joined us, as we knew that if we fell in with the
Spaniards, our ship would cut a figure--and so she did, sure enough.
That was on the morning of the 13th, and old Jervis made the signal to
prepare for action, and keep close order, which means, to have your
flying jib-boom in at the starn windows of the ship ahead of you; and we
did keep close order, for a man might have walked right round from one
ship to the other, either lee or weather line of the fleet. I shan't
forget that night, Mr Simple, as long as I live and breathe. Every now
and then we heard the signal guns of the Spanish fleet booming at a
distance to windward of us, and you may guess how our hearts leaped at
the sound, and how we watched with all our