llecting his out squadrons may have thirty and upwards.
This appears to be a probable plan; for unless it is to bring their
great fleets and armies to some point of service--some rash attempt at
conquest--they have been only subjecting them to chance of loss, which
I do not believe the Corsican would do, without the hope of an
adequate reward."

It is upon this letter, the sagacious and well-ordered inferences of
which must be candidly admitted, that a claim for superiority of
discernment over Nelson has been made for its writer. It must be
remembered, however, not as a matter of invidious detraction from one
man, but in simple justice to the other, whose insight and belief had
taken form in such wonderful work, that Nelson also had fully believed
that the enemy, if they left the Mediterranean, would proceed to
Ireland; and further, and yet more particularly, Collingwood's views
had been confirmed to him by the fact, as yet unknown to Nelson, that
the Rochefort squadron, which sailed at the time Villeneuve first
escaped in January, had since returned to Europe on the 26th of May.
"The flight to the West Indies," Collingwood said, in a letter dated
the day after the one just quoted, "was to take off our naval force,
which is the great impediment to their undertaking. The Rochefort
Squadron's return confirmed me." "I well know what your lordship's
disappointment is," he wrote, with generous sympathy; "and I share the
mortification of it. It would have been a happy day for England, could
you have met them; small as your force was, I trust it would have been
found enough. This summer is big with events. Sincerely I wish your
Lordship strength of body to go through--_and to all others, your
strength of mind_." Testy even to petulance as these two great seamen
were at times in small matters, when overwrought with their manifold
anxieties, they nowhere betray any egotistic concern as to the value
attached by others to their respective speculations, the uncertainties
of which none knew better than they, who had to act upon their
conclusions.

Meantime, at the very moment they were exchanging letters, pregnant
movements were taking place, unknown to either. The brig "Curieux,"
despatched to England by Nelson the night before he left Antigua, had
fallen in with the allied squadrons, nine hundred miles
north-northeast from Antigua, on the 19th of June--just a week after
she sailed. Keeping company with them long enough to ascert