had found utterance before in the casual remark
that his ships were provisioned for a voyage to Madras; and, even as a
guess, it struck perilously near one of Bonaparte's purposes. The
splendid decision, formulated so long before the case arose, to follow
wherever they went, held in its womb the germ of the great campaign of
Trafalgar; while in the surmise that the Toulon fleet was bound to the
West Indies, the arrow of conjecture had gone straight to the
bull's-eye.

In this same letter, addressed to General Villettes, at Malta,
formerly his coadjutor at the siege of Bastia, Nelson, in the intimacy
of friendship, reveals what was to him at once the secret of health
and the fulfilment of desire; the congenial atmosphere in which his
being throve, and expanded to fulfil the limits of his genius. "Such a
pursuit would do more, perhaps, towards restoring me to health than
all the doctors; but I fear" (his application for leave having gone
in) "this is reserved for some happier man. Not that I complain; I
have had a good race of glory, but we are never satisfied, although I
hope I am duly thankful for the past; but one cannot help, being at
sea, longing for a little more." "I hope," he had written a few months
earlier to Lord Minto, "some day, very soon, to fulfil the warmest
wishes of my Country and expectations of my friends. I hope you may be
able, at some debate, to say, as your partiality has said before,
'Nelson has done more than he has done before;' I can assure you it
shall be a stimulus to my exertion on the day of battle.... Whatever
happens, I have run a glorious race."

On the 12th of October Nelson received a piece of news which elicited
instantaneously a flash of action, illustrative at once of the
promptness of his decisions and of the briskness of temper that has
been noted already. A letter arrived from Captain Gore, commanding the
detachment outside of the Straits, that two frigates, sent from the
Brest squadron by Admiral Cornwallis, had arrived, with a captain
senior to himself, who had taken him under his orders, and carried two
of Nelson's frigates off Cadiz to intercept the Spanish treasure-fleet
expected there from America. Cornwallis's action had been taken by
orders from England, but no communication to that effect, either from
him or from the Admiralty, reached Nelson at this moment. Astounded by
a measure which could scarcely fail to cause war, and convinced, as he
said, that Spain had no wis