were to come so romantically into his life. He found the French fleet
at anchor in Aboukir Bay and sailed upon it with such amazing audacity
that the heart was knocked out of them at the very outset. Neither the
French Admiral nor anybody else would have expected the British fleet
to run their ships between them and the shore at the risk of
grounding. The _Culloden_ _did_ ground. The French had 11 out of 13
ships put out of action, but the British fleet suffered severely also,
and the loss of men was serious.[1] Out of a total of 7,401 men, 218
were killed and 678 wounded. Nelson himself was badly wounded on the
forehead, and as the skin fell down on his good eye and the blood
streamed into it, he was both dazed and blinded. He shouted to Captain
Berry as he was staggering to a fall, "I am killed; remember me to my
wife." But there was a lot more work for him to do before the fatal
day. He was carried below, believing the injury would prove fatal, in
spite of the assurances to the contrary of the surgeon who was in
attendance.

Although Nelson's courage can never be doubted, there is something
very curious in his constant, eccentric foreboding of death and the
way in which he scattered his messages about to one and another. This
habit increased amazingly after his conflict with the French at the
Nile. He seems to have had intermittent attacks of hypochondria. The
wound incident at Aboukir must have given great amusement as well as
anxiety to those about him. Unquestionably the wound had the
appearance at first of being mortal, but the surgeon soon gave a
reassuring opinion, and after binding up the ugly cut he requested his
patient to remain below. But Nelson, as soon as he knew he was not
going to die, became bored with the inactivity and insisted on writing
a dispatch to the Admiralty. His secretary was too excited to carry
out his wishes, so he tackled it himself. But his suffering being