Ah! how I should have loved to have waited to have received the congratulations of these generous enemies.  There were fifty of them in sight, and not one who was not waving his hand and shouting.  They are not really such a phlegmatic race, the English.  A gallant deed in war or in sport will always warm their hearts.  As to the old huntsman, he was the nearest to me, and I could see with my own eyes how overcome he was by what he had seen.  He was like a man paralyzed—­his mouth open, his hand, with outspread fingers, raised in the air.  For a moment my inclination was to return and to embrace him.  But already the call of duty was sounding in my ears, and these English, in spite of all the fraternity which exists among sportsmen, would certainly have made me prisoner.  There was no hope for my mission now, and I had done all that I could do.  I could see the lines of Massena’s camp no very great distance off, for, by a lucky chance, the chase had taken us in that direction.  I turned from the dead fox, saluted with my sabre, and galloped away.

But they would not leave me so easily, these gallant huntsmen.  I was the fox now, and the chase swept bravely over the plain.  It was only at the moment when I started for the camp that they could have known that I was a Frenchman, and now the whole swarm of them were at my heels.  We were within gunshot of our pickets before they would halt, and then they stood in knots and would not go away, but shouted and waved their hands at me.  No, I will not think that it was in enmity.  Rather would I fancy that a glow of admiration filled their breasts, and that their one desire was to embrace the stranger who had carried himself so gallantly and well.

THE “SLAPPING SAL.”

It was in the days when France’s power was already broken upon the seas, and when more of her three-deckers lay rotting in the Medway than were to be found in Brest harbour.  But her frigates and corvettes still scoured the ocean, closely followed ever by those of her rival.  At the uttermost ends of the earth these dainty vessels, with sweet names of girls or of flowers, mangled and shattered each other for the honour of the four yards of bunting which flapped from the end of their gaffs.

It had blown hard in the night, but the wind had dropped with the dawning, and now the rising sun tinted the fringe of the storm-wrack as it dwindled into the west and glinted on the endless crests of the long, green waves.  To north and south and west lay a skyline which was unbroken save by the spout of foam when two of the great Atlantic seas dashed each other into spray.  To the east was a rocky island, jutting out into craggy points, with a few scattered clumps of palm trees and a pennant of mist streaming out from the bare, conical hill which capped it.  A heavy surf beat upon the shore, and, at a safe distance from it, the British 32-gun frigate Leda, Captain A. P. Johnson, raised her black, glistening side upon the crest of a wave, or swooped down into an emerald valley, dipping away to the nor’ard under easy sail.  On her snow-white quarter-deck stood a stiff little brown-faced man, who swept the horizon with his glass.