_Prövestenen_, as it was the first to fire a shot, held out also to the last. One-fourth of her crew lay dead, and her flag had been shot away three times when the decks threatened to cave in and Captain Lassen spiked his last guns and left the wreck to be burned. All through the fight she was the target of ninety guns to which she could oppose only twenty-nine of her own sixty. Nelson had promised Admiral Parker to finish the fight in an hour. When the battle had lasted three, Parker signalled to him to stop. Every school-boy knows the story of how Lord Nelson put the glass to his blind eye and, remarking that he could see no signal, kept right on. In the end he had to resort to stratagem to force a truce so that he might disentangle some of his ships that were drifting into great danger in the narrow channel. The ruse succeeded. Crown Prince Frederik, moved by compassion for the wounded whom Nelson threatened to burn with the captured hulks if firing did not stop, ordered hostilities to cease without consulting the Admiral of the fleet, and the battle was over. Denmark’s honor was saved. “Nothing,” wrote our own Captain Mahan, “could place a nation’s warlike fame higher than did her great deeds that day.” All else was lost; for “there had come upon Denmark one of those days of judgment to which nations are liable who neglect in time of peace to prepare for war.” It had been long coming, but it had overtaken her at last and found all the bars down. Alongside the _Dannebrog_ throughout her fight with Nelson’s flag-ship, and edging ever closer in under the _Elephant’s_ side until at last the marines were sent to man her rail and keep it away with their muskets, lay a floating battery mounting twenty guns under command of a beardless second lieutenant. The name of Peter Willemoes will live as long as the Danish tongue is spoken. Barely graduated from the Naval Academy, he was but eighteen when the need of officers thrust the command of “Floating Battery No. 1” upon him. So gallantly did he acquit himself that Nelson took notice of the young man who, every time a broadside crashed into his ship or overhead, swung his cocked hat and led his men in a lusty cheer. When after the battle he met the Crown Prince on shore, the English commander asked to be introduced to his youthful adversary. “You ought to make an admiral of him,” he said, and Prince Frederik smiled: “If I were to make admirals of all my brave officers, I should have no captains or lieutenants left.” When the _Dannebrog_ drifted on the shoals, abandoned and burning, Willemoes cut his cables and got away under cover of the heavy smoke. Having neither sails nor oars, he was at the mercy of the tide, but luckily it carried him to the north of the Tre Kroner battery, and he reached port with forty-nine of his crew of one hundred and twenty-nine dead or wounded. The people received him as a conqueror returning with victory. His youth and splendid valor aroused the