Conscious of filling the public eye, with the privilege of being upon private view, Lord Nelson had faced the position without flinching, and drawn all the fire of the enemy. After that he began to make reprisals, according to his manner, taking no trouble to regard the women--which debarred them from thinking much of him--but settling with a steady gaze at each sea-faring man, whether he was made of good stuff or of pie-crust. And to the credit of the place it must be said that he found very little of that soft material, but plenty of good stuff, slow, perhaps, and heavy, but needing only such a soul as his to rouse it. “What a fine set of fellows you have in your village!” he said to Miss Darling after dinner, as she sat at the head of her father's table, for the Admiral had long been a widower. “The finest I have seen on the south coast anywhere. And they look as if they had been under some training. I suppose your father had most of them in the Fencibles, last summer?” “Not one of them,” Faith answered, with a sweet smile of pride. “They have their own opinions, and nothing will disturb them. Nobody could get them to believe for a moment that there was any danger of invasion. And they carried on all their fishing business almost as calmly as they do now. For that, of course, they may thank you, Lord Nelson; but they have not the smallest sense of the obligation.” “I am used to that, as your father knows; but more among the noble than the simple. For the best thing I ever did I got no praise, or at any rate very little. As to the Boulogne affair, Springhaven was quite right. There was never much danger of invasion. I only wish the villains would have tried it. Horatia, would you like to see your godfather at work? I hope not. Young ladies should be peaceful.” “Then I am not peaceful at all,” cried Dolly, who was sitting by the maimed side of her “Flapfin,” as her young brother Johnny had nicknamed him. “Why, if there was always peace, what on earth would any but very low people find to do? There could scarcely be an admiral, or a general, or even a captain, or--well, a boy to beat the drums.” “But no drum would want to be beaten, Horatia,” her elder sister Faith replied, with the superior mind of twenty-one; “and the admirals and the generals would have to be--” “Doctors, or clergymen, or something of that sort, or perhaps even worse--nasty lawyers.” Then Dolly (whose name was “Horatia” only in presence of her great godfather) blushed, as befitted the age of seventeen, at her daring, and looked at her father.