That wild night in the Aix Roads, and the solitary and daring attack on the French fleet which followed next day, were practically Cochrane's last acts as a British sailor. He achieved dazzling exploits under the flag of Chili [Transcriber's note: Chile?] and Brazil; but the most original warlike genius the English navy has ever known, fought no more battles for England. THE MAN WHO SPOILED NAPOLEON'S "DESTINY"! "Oh, who shall lightly say that Fame Is nothing but an empty name! Whilst in that sound there is a charm The nerves to brace, the heart to warm. As, thinking of the mighty dead, The young from slothful couch will start, And vow, with lifted hands outspread, Like them to act a noble part?" --JOANNA BAILLIE. From March 18 to May 20, 1799--for more than sixty days and nights, that is--a little, half-forgotten, and more than half-ruined Syrian town was the scene of one of the fiercest and most dramatic sieges recorded in military history. And rarely has there been a struggle so apparently one-sided. A handful of British sailors and Turkish irregulars were holding Acre, a town without regular defences, against Napoleon, the most brilliant military genius of his generation, with an army of 10,000 war-hardened veterans, the "Army of Italy"--soldiers who had dared the snows of the Alps and conquered Italy, and to whom victory was a familiar experience. In their ranks military daring had reached, perhaps, its very highest point. And yet the sailors inside that ring of crumbling wall won! At the blood-stained trenches of Acre Napoleon experienced his first defeat; and, years after, at St. Helena, he said of Sir Sidney Smith, the gallant sailor who baffled him, "That man made me miss my destiny." It is a curious fact that one Englishman thwarted Napoleon's career in the East, and another ended his career in the West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated most--Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny," and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock in the Atlantic.