enthusiasm of the whole country. Wherever he went crowds flocked to see him as the hero of “Holy Thursday’s Battle.” Especially was he the young people’s idol. Sailor that he was, he was “the friend of all pretty girls,” sang the poet of that day. He danced and made merry with them, but the one of them all on whom his heart was set, so runs the story, would have none of him, and sent him away to foreign parts, a saddened lover. Meanwhile much praise had not made him vain. “I did my duty,” he wrote to his father, a minor government official in the city of Odense where four years later Hans Christian Andersen was born on the anniversary day of the battle, “and I have whole limbs which I least expected. The Crown Prince and the Admiral have said that I behaved well.” He was to have one more opportunity of fighting his country’s enemy, and this time to the death. In the summer of 1807, England was advised that by the treaty of Tilsit Russia and Prussia had secretly joined Napoleon in his purpose of finally crushing his mortal enemy by uniting all the fleets of Europe against her, Denmark’s too, by compulsion if persuasion failed. Without warning a British fleet swooped down upon the unsuspecting nation, busy with the pursuits of peace, bombarded and burned Copenhagen when the Commandant refused to deliver the ships into the hands of the robbers as a “pledge of peace,” and carried away ships, supplies, even the carpenters’ tools in the navy-yard. Nothing was spared. Seventy vessels, sixteen of them ships of the line, fell into their hands, and supplies that filled ninety-two transports beside. A single fighting ship was left to Denmark of all her fleet,—the _Prince Christian Frederik_ of sixty-eight guns. She happened to be away in a Norwegian port and so escaped. Willemoes was on leave serving in the Russian navy, but hastened home when news came of the burning of Copenhagen, and found a berth under Captain Jessen. On March 22, 1808, the _Prince Christian_, so she was popularly called, hunting a British frigate that was making Danish waters insecure, met in the Kattegat the _Stately_ and the _Nassau_, each like herself of sixty-eight guns. The _Nassau_ was the old _Holsteen_, renamed,—the single prize the victors had carried home from the battle of Copenhagen. Three British frigates were working up to join them. The coast of Seeland was near, but wind and tide cut off escape to the Sound. Captain Jessen ran his ship in close under the shore so that at the last he might beach her, and awaited the enemy there.