sake, for my sake,” he wrote to St. Vincent, “if this is so, get it altered.  Our dear friend Troubridge has suffered enough.  His sufferings were in every respect more than any of us.  He deserves every reward which a grateful Country can bestow on the most meritorious sea-officer of his standing in the service.  I have felt his worth every hour of my command.”  “I well know, he is my superior,” he said on another occasion; “and I so often want his advice and assistance.  I have experienced the ability and activity of his mind and body:  it was Troubridge that equipped the squadron so soon at Syracuse—­it was he that exerted himself for me after the action—­it was Troubridge who saved the “Culloden,” when none that I know in the service would have attempted it—­it was Troubridge whom I left as myself at Naples to watch movements—­he is, as a friend and an officer, a nonpareil!” His entreaties prevailed so far that the officer in question received his promotion, not with the others, but immediately after them; a distinction which Troubridge bewailed bitterly, as a reflection upon himself and his ship.

On the 9th of August, Nelson sent a lieutenant to Alexandretta, on the northern coast of Syria, to make his way overland, by way of Aleppo, to India, with despatches to the Governor of Bombay.  Resuming briefly the events of the past months, and the numbers and character of the French army in Egypt, he expresses the hope that special care will be exercised against the departure of ships from India, to convey this huge force thither by the Red Sea.  On the side of the Mediterranean, their fate is settled by the recent victory.  They can receive nothing from France; they cannot advance freely into Syria, as water transport is essential for much of their equipment; even in Egypt itself they are hampered by the difficulties of communication—­on land by the guerilla hostility of the natives, and now on the water through his own presence and control.  The Nile, through its Rosetta mouth, had been heretofore the easiest communication between Cairo and Alexandria.  The garrison of the latter depended largely for daily bread upon this route, now closed by the fleet in Aboukir Bay.  By land, nothing short of a regiment could pass over ground where, even before the battle, the French watering-parties from the ships had to be protected by heavy armed bodies.  He intended, therefore, to remain where he was as long as possible.  “If my letter is not so correct as might be expected,” he concludes, “I trust for your excuse, when I tell you that my brain is so shook with the wounds in my head, that I am sensible I am not always so clear as could be wished; but whilst a ray of reason remains, my heart and my head shall ever be exerted for the benefit of our King and Country.”

It may be added here, that the scar left by this wound seems to have been the cause of Nelson’s hair being trained down upon his forehead, during the later years of his life.  Prior to that it was brushed well off and up, as may be seen in the portrait by Abbott, painted during his stay in England, while recovering from the loss of his arm.  After his death, a young officer of the “Victory,” who had cut off some locks for those who wished such a remembrance of their friend, speaks of “the hair that used to hang over his forehead, near the wound that he received at the Battle of the Nile.”