a naval captain had been killed, without the name being mentioned, he wrote to her of this sad event, adding expressively:  “I am very busy, yet own I am in all my glory; except with you, I would not be anywhere but where I am, for the world.”  On July 7th the first outwork fell.  The attack upon the others was then steadily and systematically prosecuted, until on the 19th all had been captured, and the besiegers stood face to face with the town walls.

During this time Nelson, as always, was continually at the front and among the most exposed.  Out of six guns in the battery which he calls “ours,” five were disabled in six days.  On the 12th at daylight, a heavy fire opened from the town, which, he says, “seldom missed our battery;” and at seven o’clock a shot, which on the ricochet cleared his head by a hair’s breadth, drove sand into his face and right eye with such violence as to incapacitate him.  He spoke lightly and cheerfully of the incident to Lord Hood, “I got a little hurt this morning:  not much, as you may judge by my writing,” and remained absent from duty only the regular twenty-four hours; but, after some fluctuations of hope, the sight of the eye was permanently lost to him.  Of General Stuart’s conduct in the operations he frequently speaks with cordial admiration.  “He is not sparing of himself on any occasion, he every night sleeps with us in the advanced battery.  If I may be allowed to judge, he is an extraordinary good judge of ground.  No officer ever deserved success more.”  At the same time he expresses dissatisfaction with some of the subordinate army officers, to whose inefficiency he attributes the necessity for undue personal exertion on the general’s part:  “The General is not well.  He fatigues himself too much, but I can’t help seeing he is obliged to do it.  He has not a person to forward his views,—­the engineer sick, the artillery captain not fit for active service; therefore every minute thing must be done by himself, or it is not done at all.”

The work was tedious and exhausting, and the malaria of the hot Corsican summer told heavily on men’s health and patience.  The supply of ammunition, and of material of war generally, for the army seems to have been inadequate; and heavy demands were made upon the fleet, not only for guns, which could be returned, but for powder and shot, the expenditure of which might prove embarrassing before they could be renewed.  The troops also were not numerous enough, under the climatic conditions, to do all their own duty.  In such circumstances, when two parties are working together to the same end, but under no common control, each is prone to think the other behindhand in his work and exacting in his demands.  “Why don’t Lord Hood land 500 men to work?” said Colonel Moore, the general’s right-hand man.  “Our soldiers are tired.”  Nelson, on the other hand, thought that Moore wanted over-much battering done to the breach of a work, before he led the stormers to it; and Hood, who was