First of all, almost opposite the Hard, and just where the _Victory_ herself now lies, there is moored a big yellow-sided two-decker of foreign build flying the British flag. Just now, perhaps, there is no man-of-war name all the world over of more unpleasant notoriety than hers. She is the _Monarque_, a seventy-four, taken from the French, and it was on her quarter-deck, some eighteen months ago, on a dull and cloudy March day, that they shot Admiral Byng. The _Monarque_ has now just returned from “Straits” service, and if you went on board her you would see, still there, and part of the ship’s company, the men of the platoon of marines who formed Byng’s firing party. Near the _Monarque_ lies a big ninety-gun three-decker—a yellow-sided vessel also, for all men-of-war are so painted. It is the _St. George_. In her cabin Byng’s court martial sat some twenty months ago. The court, by a grim coincidence, was held in the very cabin that had been Byng’s own thirteen years before that, when Byng was captain of this same _St. George_. There, on a snowy January day, as plenty of people at Portsmouth can tell you, for they were looking on, Byng stood to hear his sentence in his own old cabin, crowded almost to suffocation with spectators, stuffy and close, and the walls “sweating down” with trickling beads of water; the hapless, doomed British Admiral, standing there, firm and erect, with squared shoulders, calmly facing his judges, with his own sword lying on the table, its point turned towards himself. To the very last, they say, Byng expected an acquittal. He had not anticipated, at the worst, a sentence more severe than a reprimand. So he himself said in the cabin of the _Monarque_, on the very morning of the 27th January, when the Admiralty Marshal came to accompany him on board the _St. George_ to hear the finding of the court. He learnt the dread reality first as he came up the side of the _St. George_. At the entering port a personal friend, instructed privately by the President of the Court to do so, stood waiting to give the Admiral a word of warning. As he met his friend, Byng saw instantly from his downcast countenance and embarrassed manner that things had gone adversely and that the sentence was a hard one. “What is the matter,” asked the Admiral, “have they broke me?” The bearer of the news, convinced that Byng had no idea of what was coming, hesitated and stammered. Byng stopped short. He gazed fixedly at his friend for a few seconds, and then changed colour as he seemed to take in the situation. A moment later he had recovered himself. Exclaiming in a calm tone, “Well, well, I understand: if nothing but my blood will satisfy them, let them take it,” he passed with set countenance into the presence of the Court. [Illustration: THE EXECUTION OF ADMIRAL BYNG _From a Contemporary Print_]