the prospect of a speedy departure,
the signal for which sounded even sooner than was expected. By his own
account, he was only four times in London, and all the moments that
could be spared from external calls he spent at Merton, where there
gathered a large family party, including all his surviving brothers
and sisters, with several of their children. "I cannot move at
present," he writes on the 31st of August, in declining an invitation,
"as all my family are with me, and my stay is very uncertain; and,
besides, I have refused for the present all invitations." "I went to
Merton on Saturday" (August 24th), wrote Minto, "and found Nelson just
sitting down to dinner, surrounded by a family party, of his brother
the Dean, Mrs. Nelson, their children, and the children of a sister.
Lady Hamilton at the head of the table, and Mother Cadogan[114] at the
bottom. I had a hearty welcome. He looks remarkably well and full of
spirits. His conversation is a cordial in these low times. Lady
Hamilton has improved and added to the house and the place extremely
well, without his knowing she was about it. He found it already done.
She is a clever being, after all: the passion is as hot as ever."

Over all hung, unseen, the sword of Damocles. Nelson himself seems to
have been possessed already by vague premonitions of the coming end,
which deepened and darkened around him as he went forward to his fate.
The story told of his saying to the upholsterer, who had in charge the
coffin made from the mast of the "Orient," that a certificate of its
identity should be engraved on the lid, because he thought it highly
probable that he might want it on his return, is, indeed, but a
commonplace, light-hearted remark, which derives what significance it
has purely from the event; but it is easy to recognize in his writings
the recurrent, though intermittent, strain of unusual foreboding. Life
then held much for him; and it is when richest that the possibility of
approaching loss possesses the consciousness with the sense of
probability. Upon a soul of his heroic temper, however, such
presentiments, though they might solemnize and consecrate the passing
moments, had no power to appall, nor to convert cheerfulness into
gloom. The light that led him never burned more brightly, nor did he
ever follow with more unfaltering step.

Fixed in his mind to return to his command in October, he soon felt
that, in the uncertainties of the French movements, a cal