I must tell you that the whole ship's company had been most seriously concerned about the health of the Admiral. The wound he had in the head in the battle, though it was only from a heavy splinter, produced a sort of concussion of the brain; and this, with the business of so great an affair, even after our glorious victory was gained, combined with his natural proneness to sickness, produced a most dangerous fever, which was like to have carried him off in any one of the fifteen hours immediately before we cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, though in the two or three weeks we were sailing up the Mediterranean by way of Candia he was more than once seemingly full recovered. After we had brought him to the Ambassador's palace I felt confident that he would mend. A spell on shore always did much for his general health, and we could see that under Lady Hamilton's direction he was like to have the best of attention. As it turned out it was marvellous what she did for him. The very next day he was fit to crack a jest about the diet of asses' milk, which was judged to be the only nourishment light enough for a digestion so disordered by fever. "What would the French say?" he cried: "I can picture the Paris lampooner drawing me with asses' ears in a lion's skin, imagining myself to be the nobler animal. Yes, to the French I shall always be the ass nourished on asses' milk who thought himself a lion!" And then he went off into one of his peals of laughter--rather a shaky peal it must be confessed--but then a straw will serve to show which way the wind blows. What set him up above all (and set us up too, you may be sure--the Admiral's secretary, Will and myself, and generally one or two of the captains) was the pains My Lady took to keep his mind from troubling about his condition. The ship surgeon, had he been a landsman, might have been expected to be flat against it, after the manner of most doctors, and to have prescribed rest, complete rest, seeing no one, darkened rooms, and so on; but Michael Jefferson was a man of a different stamp. It was his business to make men fit for duty again with as little rest as possible. And then he knew the Admiral. What would that eager, never-resting, planning mind have done in a darkened room, where he could see nothing, cut off from all friends who could give him any news of his fleet? He would have imagined, to say the least of it, a French fleet entering the Bay, and he not being on his ship to have the honour of beating them. In short, he would have harassed himself into his grave. My Lady went to the root of the matter at once: "It is not rest he wants," she maintained; "it is not physic he needs, but dieting carefully and treating like a spoiled child. I must do the spoiling," she said, with that smile which lit up her whole face and made her eyes so soft; and I could vow that when she used those words she had not a thought of their ever being any more than friends.