it was, the French got back the twenty thousand good seamen whom we
had captured, and a fine dance they led us with their Boulogne
flotillas and fleets of invasion before we were able to catch them
again.

My father, as I remember him best, was a tough, strong little man,
of no great breadth, but solid and well put together. His face was
burned of a reddish colour, as bright as a flower-pot, and in spite
of his age (for he was only forty at the time of which I speak) it
was shot with lines, which deepened if he were in any way perturbed,
so that I have seen him turn on the instant from a youngish man to
an elderly. His eyes especially were meshed round with wrinkles, as
is natural for one who had puckered them all his life in facing foul
wind and bitter weather. These eyes were, perhaps, his strangest
feature, for they were of a very clear and beautiful blue, which
shone the brighter out of that ruddy setting. By nature he must
have been a fair-skinned man, for his upper brow, where his cap came
over it, was as white as mine, and his close-cropped hair was tawny.

He had served, as he was proud to say, in the last of our ships
which had been chased out of the Mediterranean in '97, and in the
first which had re-entered it in '98. He was under Miller, as third
lieutenant of the Theseus, when our fleet, like a pack of eager fox
hounds in a covert, was dashing from Sicily to Syria and back again
to Naples, trying to pick up the lost scent. With the same good
fighting man he served at the Nile, where the men of his command
sponged and rammed and trained until, when the last tricolour had
come down, they hove up the sheet anchor and fell dead asleep upon
the top of each other under the capstan bars. Then, as a second
lieutenant, he was in one of those grim three-deckers with powder-