of a limb would have kept me from my duty, and I believe my exertions conduced to preserve me in this general mortality.”  In his cheery letters, now, no trace is perceptible of the fretful, complaining temper, which impaired, though it did not destroy, the self-devotion of his later career.  No other mistress at this time contended with honor for the possession of his heart; no other place than the post of duty before Calvi distracted his desires, or appealed to his imagination through his senses.  Not even Lord Hood’s report of the siege of Bastia, which here came to his knowledge, and by which he thought himself wronged, had bitterness to overcome the joy of action and of self-contentment.

Not many days were required, after the fall of Calvi, to remove the fleet, and the seamen who had been serving on shore, from the pestilential coast.  Nelson seems to have been intrusted with the embarkation of the prisoners in the transports which were to take them to Toulon.  He told his wife that he had been four months landed, and felt almost qualified to pass his examination as a besieging general, but that he had no desire to go on with campaigning.  On the 11th of August, the day after the delivery of the place, he was again on board the “Agamemnon,” from whose crew had been drawn the greatest proportion of the seamen for the batteries.  One hundred and fifty of them were now in their beds.  “My ship’s company are all worn out,” he wrote, “as is this whole army, except myself; nothing hurts me,—­of two thousand men I am the most healthy.  Every other officer is scarcely able to crawl.”  Among the victims of the deadly climate was Lieutenant Moutray, the son of the lady to whom, ten years before, he had been so warmly attracted in the West Indies.  Nelson placed a monument to him in the church at San Fiorenzo.

On the 10th of August the “Agamemnon” sailed from Calvi, and after a stop at San Fiorenzo, where Hood then was, reached Leghorn on the 18th.  Now that the immediate danger of the siege was over, Nelson admitted to his wife the serious character of the injury he had received.  The right eye was nearly deprived of sight,—­only so far recovered as to enable him to distinguish light from darkness.  For all purposes of use it was gone; but the blemish was not to be perceived, unless attention was drawn to it.

At Leghorn the ship lay for a month,—­the first period of repose since she went into commission, a year and a half before.  While there, the physician to the fleet came on board and surveyed the crew, finding them in a very weak state, and unfit to serve.  This condition of things gave Nelson hopes that, upon the approaching departure of Lord Hood for England, the “Agamemnon” might go with him; for he was loath to separate from an admiral whose high esteem he had won, and upon whom he looked as the first sea-officer of Great Britain.  Hood was inclined to take her, and to transfer the ship’s company bodily to a seventy-four.  This he considered