of that hero of
storms, Cornwallis. Napoleon arrived at Boulogne on the 3rd of August,
and reviewed his troops, in a line on the beach some eight miles long.
A finer sight he had never seen, and he wrote in his pride: "The English
know not what is hanging over their ears. If we are masters of the
passage for twelve hours, England is conquered." But all depended on
Villeneuve, and happily he could not depend upon his nerves.

Meanwhile the young man who was charged with a message which he would
gladly have died to discharge was far away, eating out his heart in
silence, or vainly relieving it with unknown words. At the last gasp, or
after he ceased to gasp for the time, and was drifting insensible, but
happily with his honest face still upward, a Dutchman, keeping a sharp
lookout for English cruisers, espied him. He was taken on board of a
fine bark bound from Rotterdam for Java, with orders to choose the track
least infested by that ravenous shark Britannia. Scudamore was treated
with the warmest kindness and the most gentle attention, for the
captain's wife was on board, and her tender heart was moved with
compassion. Yet even so, three days passed by with no more knowledge
of time on his part than the face of a clock has of its hands; and more
than a week was gone before both body and mind were in tone and tune
again. By that time the stout Dutch bark, having given a wide berth
to the wakes of war, was forty leagues west of Cape Finisterre, under
orders to touch no land short of the Cape, except for fresh water at St.
Jago.

Blyth Scudamore was blest with that natural feeling of preference for
one's own kin and country which the much larger minds of the present
period flout, and scout as barbarous. Happily our periodical blight
is expiring, like cuckoo-spit, in its own bubbles; and the time is
returning when the bottle-blister will not be accepted as the good ripe
peach. Scudamore was of the times that have been (and perhaps may
be coming again, in the teeth and the jaw of universal suffrage), of
resolute, vigorous, loyal people, holding fast all that God gives them,
and declining to be led by the tail, by a gentleman who tacked their
tail on as his handle.

This certainty of belonging still to a firm and substantial race of men
(whose extinction would leave the world nothing to breed from) made the
gallant Scudamore so anxious to do his duty, that he could not do it.
Why do we whistle to a horse overburdened with