about Saratoga.  “If we could have begun our expedition four weeks earlier,” wrote a German general there present, “I am satisfied everything would have been ended this year [1776]; were our whole army here, it would be an easy matter to drive the enemy from their entrenchments at Ticonderoga.”  The delay, not of four weeks only, but of the whole summer, was obtained by the naval force organized upon Champlain by Arnold and his superior, General Schuyler.  The following year the invasion was resumed, under General Burgoyne.  Pellew accompanied him with a body of seamen, taking part in all the operations down to the final surrender.  Burgoyne, indeed, afterwards chaffed him with being the cause of the disaster, by rebuilding the bridge which enabled the army to cross from the east bank of the Hudson to the west.

Returning to England in the early part of 1778, Pellew was made lieutenant, and in 1780 we find him again serving under Captain Pownoll, as first lieutenant of the Apollo frigate.  On the 15th of June, in the same year, the Apollo met the French frigate Stanislas.  A severe action followed, and at the end of an hour Pownoll was shot through the body.  As his young friend raised him from the deck, he had barely time to say, “Pellew, I know you won’t give his Majesty’s ship away,” and immediately expired.  The engagement lasted an hour longer, when the enemy, which had all the time been standing in for the Belgian coast, took the ground, the most of her spars, already wounded, going overboard with the shock.  The Apollo had hauled off a few moments before, finding that she had less than five feet of water under her keel.

Though unable again to attack the Stanislas, which claimed the protection of the neutral flag, the result was substantially a victory; but to Pellew’s grief for the death of a tried friend was added the material loss of a powerful patron.  Happily, however, his reputation was known to the head of the Admiralty, who not only promoted him for this action, but also gave him a ship, though a poor one.  After a succession of small commands, he was fortunate enough again to distinguish himself,—­driving ashore and destroying several French privateers, under circumstances of such danger and difficulty as to win him his next grade, post-captain.  This step, which, so far as selection went, fixed his position in the navy, he received on the 25th of May, 1782.

The ten years of peace that shortly followed were passed by many officers in retirement, which we have seen was contentedly accepted by his distinguished contemporary, Saumarez; but Pellew was a seaman to the marrow, and constantly sought employment afloat.  When out of occupation, he for a while tried farming, the Utopian employment that most often beguiles the imagination of the inbred seaman in occasional weariness of salt water; but, as his biographer justly remarks, his mind, which allowed him to be happy only when active, could ill accommodate itself to pursuits that almost forbade exertion.  “To have an object in view, yet to be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation.  He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by watching their daily progress.”