This alarm passed away like others.  Bonaparte had no idea of pushing ships into the Mediterranean, or embarking his naval forces on any doubtful experiments, until he had first tested the possibility of that supreme adventure, the invasion of England.  When that mighty imagination passed away like a dream that leaves no trace, he ordered his fleets into the Mediterranean, as Nelson had expected, and the result was Trafalgar.

As the spring of 1804 opened, the French admiral at Toulon began to exercise his ships outside the harbor, singly or in small groups, like half-fledged birds learning to fly; or, to use Nelson’s expression, “My friend Monsieur La Touche sometimes plays bo-peep in and out of Toulon, like a mouse at the edge of her hole.”  The only drill-ground for fleets, the open sea, being closed to him, he could do no better than these furtive excursions, to prepare for the eagle’s flight Napoleon had prescribed to him.  “Last week, at different times, two sail of the line put their heads out of Toulon, and on Thursday, the 5th [April], in the afternoon, they all came out.”  “Yesterday [the 9th] a rear-admiral and seven sail, including frigates, put their nose outside the harbour.  If they go on playing this game, some day we shall lay salt upon their tails, and so end the campaign.”

These outings—­“capers,” Nelson called them—­naturally became more venturesome by little and little, as the British suffered them to proceed without serious attempt at molestation, or near approach on their part.  Nelson veiled the keenness of his watch, as he crouched for a spring, with a drowsy appearance of caution and indifference.  The French admiral, Latouche Treville, was he who had commanded at Boulogne when Nelson’s boats were repelled with slaughter; and it was also he who in 1792 had sent a grenadier to the King of Naples, with a peremptory summons to diplomatic apology in one hand, and a threat of bombardment in the other.  For both these affairs Nelson considered he had a personal score to settle.  “I rather believe my antagonist at Toulon begins to be angry with me:  at least, I am trying to make him so; and then, he may come out, and beat me, as he says he did off Boulogne.  He is the Admiral that went to Naples in December, 1792, who landed the grenadier.  I owe him something for that.”

The French having eight sail-of-the-line certainly ready for sea, and two or three more nearly so—­how nearly Nelson was not sure—­he now endeavored to lure them out.  “I have taken a method of making Mr. La Touche Treville angry.  I have left Sir Richard Bickerton, with part of the fleet, twenty leagues from hence, and, with five of the line, am preventing his cutting capers, which he has done for some time past, off Cape Sicie.”  “He seems inclined to try his hand with us,” he writes a week later, “and by my keeping so great an inferiority close to him, perhaps he may some day be tempted.”  Nelson had near Toulon at the time nine ships-of-the-line.  Had he succeeded