“What crotchet is in his too active brain now?” the elder and stronger man asked himself, as he found himself hooked by the right arm, and led down a track through the trees scarcely known to himself, and quite out of sight from the village. “Why, this is not the way to the beach! However, it is never any good to oppose him. He gets his own way so because of his fame. Or perhaps that's the way he got his fame. But to show me about over my own land! But let him go on, let him go on.” “You are wondering, I dare say, what I am about,” cried Nelson, stopping suddenly, and fixing his sound eye--which was wonderfully keen, though he was always in a fright about it--upon the large and peaceful blinkers of his ancient commander; “but now I shall be able to convince you, though I am not a land-surveyor, nor even a general of land-forces. If God Almighty prolongs my life--which is not very likely--it will be that I may meet that scoundrel, Napoleon Bonaparte, on dry land. I hear that he is eager to encounter me on the waves, himself commanding a line-of-battle ship. I should send him to the devil in a quarter of an hour. And ashore I could astonish him, I think, a little, if I had a good army to back me up. Remember what I did at Bastia, in the land that produced this monster, and where I was called the Brigadier; and again, upon the coast of Italy, I showed that I understood all their dry-ground business. Tush! I can beat him, ashore and afloat; and I shall, if I live long enough. But this time the villain is in earnest, I believe, with his trumpery invasion; and as soon as he hears that I am gone, he will make sure of having his own way. We know, of course, there are fifty men as good as myself to stop him, including you, my dear Darling; but everything goes by reputation--the noise of the people--praise-puff. That's all I get; while the luckier fellows, like Cathcart, get the prize-money. But I don't want to grumble. Now what do you see?” “Well, I see you, for one thing,” the Admiral answered, at his leisure, being quite inured to his friend's quick fire, “and wearing a coat that would be a disgrace to any other man in the navy. And further on I see some land that I never shall get my rent for; and beyond that nothing but the sea, with a few fishing-craft inshore, and in the offing a sail, an outward-bound East Indiaman--some fool who wouldn't wait for convoy, with war as good as proclaimed again.” “Nothing but the sea, indeed? The sweep of the land, and the shelter of the bay, the shoaling of the shore without a rock to break it, the headland that shuts out both wind and waves; and outside the headland, off Pebbleridge, deep water for a fleet of line-of-battle ships to anchor and command the land approaches--moreover, a stream of the purest water from deep and never-failing springs--Darling, the place of all places in England for the French to land is opposite to your front door.”