their heads all lying the same way.

At a quarter past one, a ball fired from the mizzen-top of the
Redoubtable struck Nelson on the left shoulder, and he fell on his face.
"They have done for me at last, Hardy," he said; "my backbone is shot
through." He was carried below, laid on a pallet in the midshipmen's
berth, and insisted that the surgeon should leave him--"for you can do
nothing for me." He was in great pain, and expressed much anxiety for
the event of the action, until Captain Hardy was able to tell him that
fifteen of the enemy had been taken. Repeating that he left Lady
Hamilton and Horatia as a legacy to his country, and exclaiming, "Thank
God, I have done my duty!" Nelson expired.

He cannot be said to have fallen prematurely whose work was done.

* * * * *

MADAME DE STAAL

Memoirs

Marguerite Jeanne de Launay, Baronne de Staal, was born in
Paris on May 30, 1684. Her father was a painter of the name of
Cordier who was in England when his daughter was born; and the
name by which she was known, de Launay, was that of her
mother's family. Her story is told by herself, with admirable
sincerity, in these Memoirs, which follow her life until the
year 1735, when, at the age of fifty-one, she married Baron de
Staal, a widower and an officer in the Guard. Her death took
place in Paris on June 16, 1750. Her Memoirs, first published
in 1755, are among the most interesting records of that
period, and though their historical accuracy has been doubted,
her portraits of persons are vivid and convincing. Her style
has been highly commended by Sainte-Beuve and other French
literary critics.

_A Convent Child_

If I write the record of my life, it is not because it deserves
attention, but in order to amuse myself by my recollections. My story is
just the opposite of the ordinary romance, wherein a girl brought up as
a peasant becomes an illustrious princess; for I was treated in
childhood as a person of distinction, and had to find out later that I
was a nobody and owned nothing in the world. And so, not having been
trained from the first to ill fortune, my spirit has always rebelled
against the servitude in which I have had to live.

My father, for some reason that I never knew, had to leave France and
live in England; and my mother, alone in Paris and without resources,
took me with her as an infant