t be said that he found
very little of that soft material, but plenty of good stuff, slow,
perhaps, and heavy, but needing only such a soul as his to rouse it.

"What a fine set of fellows you have in your village!" he said to Miss
Darling after dinner, as she sat at the head of her father's table,
for the Admiral had long been a widower. "The finest I have seen on
the south coast anywhere. And they look as if they had been under some
training. I suppose your father had most of them in the Fencibles, last
summer?"

"Not one of them," Faith answered, with a sweet smile of pride. "They
have their own opinions, and nothing will disturb them. Nobody could get
them to believe for a moment that there was any danger of invasion. And
they carried on all their fishing business almost as calmly as they do
now. For that, of course, they may thank you, Lord Nelson; but they have
not the smallest sense of the obligation."

"I am used to that, as your father knows; but more among the noble than
the simple. For the best thing I ever did I got no praise, or at any
rate very little. As to the Boulogne affair, Springhaven was quite
right. There was never much danger of invasion. I only wish the villains
would have tried it. Horatia, would you like to see your godfather at
work? I hope not. Young ladies should be peaceful."

"Then I am not peaceful at all," cried Dolly, who was sitting by the
maimed side of her "Flapfin," as her young brother Johnny had nicknamed
him. "Why, if there was always peace, what on earth would any but very
low people find to do? There could scarcely be an admiral, or a general,
or even a captain, or--well, a boy to beat the drums."

"But no drum would want to be beaten, Horatia," her elder sister Faith
replied, with the superior mind of twenty-one; "and the admirals and the
generals would have to be--"

"Doctors, or clergymen, or something of that sort, or perhaps even
worse--nasty lawyers." Then Dolly (whose name was "Horatia" only
in presence of her great godfather) blushed, as befitted the age of
seventeen, at her daring, and looked at her father.

"That last cut was meant for me," Frank Darling, the eldest of the
family, explained from the opposite side of the table. "Your lordship,
though so well known to us, can hardly be expected to know or remember
all the little particulars of our race. We are four, as you know; and
the elder two are peaceful, while the younger pair are warlike. And I
am to be t