Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/21

18 young bride, reminding us, with her pale, delicate face and French millinery, of our fair young countrywomen—quite un-English. The Victory is Captain S.'s home, and the lady was his daughter.

We then went into the cockpit and groped our way to the dark, narrow state-room (a midshipman's) where Nelson was carried after he was shot down. Captain H. pointed to the beam where his head lay when he died. There a heroic spirit had passed away, and left a halo in this dark, dismal place. Place and circumstance are never less important to a man than when he is dying, and yet it was a striking contrast (and the world is full of such), the man dying in this wretched, dark, stifling hole, when his name was resounding through all the palaces of Europe, and making our young hearts leap in the New World. Shall I tell you what remembrance touched me most as I stood there? not his gallant deeds, for they are written in blood, and many a vulgar spirit has achieved such; but the exquisite tenderness gleaming forth in his last words, "Kiss me, Hardy!" These touched the chord of universal humanity.

Our next step was from the poetic-romantic to the actual, from the Victory to the biscuit-bakery, a place where biscuits are made for naval stores by steam. A police-man started out upon us "like a spider," as Captain H. very descriptively said, and announced that all ingress to the art and mystery of steam-baking was forbidden to foreigners; and we were turning away acquiescently, for the most curious of our