naturally contribute to increase that “confidence in himself among rocks and sands,” which was afterwards to be so “great a comfort” to him.  In his later career he had frequent and pressing need of that particular form of professional judgment and self-reliance for which these early experiences stood him in good stead.  As he afterwards wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, when pleading the cause of a daring and skilful officer who had run his ship ashore:  “If I had been censured every time I have run my ship, or fleets under my command, into great danger, I should long ago have been out of the service, and never in the House of Peers.”  At the critical instants of the Nile and Copenhagen, as well as in the less conspicuous but more prolonged anxieties of the operations off Corsica and along the Riviera of Genoa, this early habit, grafted upon the singularly steady nerve wherewith he was endowed by nature, sustained him at a height of daring and achievement to which very few have been able to rise.

The other incident recorded by him as happening while on board the “Lowestoffe,” he himself cites as illustrative of temperament.  “Whilst in this frigate, an event happened which presaged my character; and, as it conveys no dishonour to the officer alluded to, I shall insert it.  Blowing a gale of wind, and a very heavy sea, the frigate captured an American letter-of-marque.  The first Lieutenant was ordered to board her, which he did not do, owing to the very heavy sea.  On his return, the Captain said, ’Have I no officer in the ship who can board the prize?’ On which the Master ran to the gangway, to get into the boat:  when I stopped him, saying, ’It is my turn now; and if I come back, it is yours.’  This little incident,” he continues, “has often occurred to my mind; and I know it is my disposition, that difficulties and dangers do but increase my desire of attempting them.”  An action of this sort, in its results unimportant, gives keener satisfaction in the remembrance than do greater deeds, because more purely individual,—­entirely one’s own.  It is upon such as this, rather than upon his victories, that Nelson in his narrative dwells caressingly.  His personal daring at St. Vincent, and against the gunboats off Cadiz, ministered more directly to his self-esteem, to that consciousness of high desert which was dear to him, than did the Battle of the Nile, whose honors he, though ungrudgingly, shared with his “band of brothers.”

When the “Lowestoffe” had been a year upon the station, it became very doubtful whether Locker could continue in her, and finally he did go home ill.  It was probably due to this uncertainty that he obtained the transfer of Nelson, in whom he had become most affectionately interested, to the “Bristol,” flagship of Sir Peter Parker, the commander-in-chief.  Here, under the admiral’s own eye, warmly recommended by his last captain, and with a singular faculty for enlisting the love and