uld return, my thanks will never cease being offered up to
the Throne of His Mercy. If it is His good Providence to cut
short my days upon earth, I bow with the greatest submission,
relying that He will protect those so dear to me, that I may
leave behind. His will be done: Amen, Amen, Amen.

At six o'clock on the morning of the 14th Nelson arrived at
Portsmouth. At half-past eleven his flag was again hoisted on board
the "Victory," and at 2 P.M. he embarked. His youngest and favorite
sister, Mrs. Matcham, with her husband, had gone to Portsmouth to see
him off. As they were parting, he said to her: "Oh, Katty! that
gypsy;" referring to his fortune told by a gypsy in the West Indies
many years before, that he should arrive at the head of his profession
by the time he was forty. "What then?" he had asked at the moment; but
she replied, "I can tell you no more; the book is closed."[120] The
Battle of the Nile, preceding closely the completion of his fortieth
year, not unnaturally recalled the prediction to mind, where the
singularity of the coincidence left it impressed; and now, standing as
he did on the brink of great events, with half-acknowledged foreboding
weighing on his heart, he well may have yearned to know what lay
beyond that silence, within the closed covers of the book of fate.

FOOTNOTES:

[110] In a letter to the Earl of Mornington, dated December 21st, 1805,
Wellington, then Wellesley, said, "I arrived in England about September
10th." The margin of time for meeting Nelson, who left Merton on the 13th,
was therefore small, and fixes very closely the date of this interesting
interview. The Colonial and War Offices seem then to have been under one
head.

[111] Correspondence and Diaries of John Wilson Croker, vol. ii. p. 233.

[112] The Prime Minister Pitt.

[113] Compare for example, _ante_, vol. i. p. 421.

[114] Lady Hamilton's mother.

[115] Nelson to Right Hon. George Rose, August 29 and September 3, 1805:
Nicolas, vol. vii. pp. 18, 19, 29.

[116] _Ante_, p. 31.

[117] This is the earliest intimation that has come under the author's eye
of the formulation (as distinguished from the development) of the groups of
Orders in Council of 1807, bearing upon the Neutral Trade, which were
issued and carried out by a Ministry other than the one which Nelson knew.
The measure was clearly under consideration before Trafalgar.

[118] That is, the ship ready to sail in half an hour, one o