“I cannot see their grievance, Captain Ball,” said Cochrane.

“When you are promoted to a two-decker, my lord, it will possibly become clearer to you.”

“You speak as if a cruiser had nothing to do but take prizes.  If that is your view, you will permit me to say that you know very little of the matter.  I have handled a sloop, a corvette, and a frigate, and I have found a great variety of duties in each of them.  I have had to avoid the enemy’s battleships and to fight his cruisers.  I have had to chase and capture his privateers, and to cut them out when they run under his batteries.  I have had to engage his forts, to take my men ashore, and to destroy his guns and his signal stations.  All this, with convoying, reconnoitring, and risking one’s own ship in order to gain a knowledge of the enemy’s movements, comes under the duties of the commander of a cruiser.  I make bold to say that the man who can carry these objects out with success has deserved better of the country than the officer of a battleship, tacking from Ushant to the Black Rocks and back again until she builds up a reef with her beef-bones.”

“Sir,” said the angry old sailor, “such an officer is at least in no danger of being mistaken for a privateersman.”

“I am surprised, Captain Bulkeley,” Cochran retorted hotly, “that you should venture to couple the names of privateersman and King’s officer.”

There was mischief brewing among these hot-headed, short-spoken salts, but Captain Foley changed the subject to discuss the new ships which were being built in the French ports.  It was of interest to me to hear these men, who were spending their lives in fighting against our neighbours, discussing their character and ways.  You cannot conceive—­you who live in times of peace and charity—­how fierce the hatred was in England at that time against the French, and above all against their great leader.  It was more than a mere prejudice or dislike.  It was a deep, aggressive loathing of which you may even now form some conception if you examine the papers or caricatures of the day.  The word “Frenchman” was hardly spoken without “rascal” or “scoundrel” slipping in before it.  In all ranks of life and in every part of the country the feeling was the same.  Even the Jacks aboard our ships fought with a viciousness against a French vessel which they would never show to Dane, Dutchman, or Spaniard.

If you ask me now, after fifty years, why it was that there should have been this virulent feeling against them, so foreign to the easy-going and tolerant British nature, I would confess that I think the real reason was fear.  Not fear of them individually, of course--our foulest detractors have never called us faint-hearted—­but fear of their star, fear of their future, fear of the subtle brain whose plans always seemed to go aright, and of the heavy hand which had struck nation after nation to the ground.  We were but a small country,