Then, perhaps, from Lady Hamilton, mistaking, in her prostration, the steward for the admiral: “O, my dear lord! though I cannot rise to thank you, believe me that for all you have done my heart goes out to you.” To which the honest sailor would respond, “Give it went, mum, and take the basin.” In truth it seemed the stars fought against us with the sea. The _Vanguard_ itself was none too big a vessel. She was what they call, I believe, a seventy-four with two tiers of guns--not a first-rater. I saw her commander sometimes, in the glimpses of the moon. He was not utterly impervious himself to the calls of the deep. His right arm was gone, and the sleeve pinned to his breast. He had a gentle, sober face, blind of one eye, and the scar of a late healed wound on his forehead. Casually met, I should have taken him for a little mild professor, who had once said Bo to a goose and been well pecked for his pains. We had weighed anchor on the 22nd, and at once run into baffling winds. The day before, the king had received on board a deputation mixed of the marine, the city, and representatives of the Lazzari, who were all aghast to learn that His Majesty projected a withdrawal to his Sicilian capital. He was very short with them. When facts should reassure him of their loyalty, he said, he would return. In the meantime, he left General Pignatelli (a poor bemused creature) as his regent to restore order. He said nothing of his wholesale plunder of the public funds, and was only in a perspiration to escape before it should be discovered. Then he went below, having lighted and flung ashore the brand which was to set the city blazing. And the following day we sailed for Palermo, in a vessel as full of royal livestock as if it had been a training ship for kings. Besides their Majesties, and as many of their progeny as they could recollect at the moment, there were on board the ineffable Hamiltons; English Acton, their minister and the queen’s lover; princes of the blood Castelcicala and Belmonte, and a few others of condition. Amongst us all, from the first, there was little affectation of state, and none of stateliness. It was just a scurry and tumble--an encumbering mass of royalty, in the thick of which the unhappy crew were hard put to it to find quarters. One of the poor children even died of sickness; and the queen screamed lamentations over it whenever she could recall its name. At length, more dead than alive, we were all pitchforked ashore out of a battered hulk, and carried piecemeal through the city to the old fortified palace at its southernmost end, where, for the next seven months, was to be enacted the royal intermezzo in the tragedy of Naples.