the Nymphe had been endangered by the pressure of the jibboom of the Cléopâtre; but during the confusion of boarding the jibboom carried away, and the ships fell on board of each other, head and stern, port side to port side. Here again was trouble, for the larboard boom-iron of the maintop-mast studding-sail of the Cléopâtre had hooked in the larboard leech-rope of the Nymphe's main topsail, dragging at the sail.' The mast was expected each moment to go over the side; but, as a last chance to save it, Pellew shouted an offer of ten guineas to any man who would risk his life on the yard and release the sail, and a maintopman named Burgess promptly earned the money. The mainmast was saved, but the ships were still foul of one another, held partly by the Nymphe's best bower anchor; and before Lieut. Pellowe was able to get clear by dropping the anchor, nearly half the prisoners had been transferred to the Nymphe. One man at least had small pleasure in the victory. When all was ended, one of the most recently joined seamen, who had been some forty-eight hours in the Royal Navy, was found sitting on a gun-carriage in bilious discontent. He complained that he had been all right when the fighting was going on, but his sickness returned directly the fighting stopped; and he did not know what was the matter with his leg, it smarted so. The surgeons found a musket-ball in it.

No more heroic sailor ever fought than Captain Jean Mullon of the Cléopâtre. He was one of the few officers of the old régime remaining in the Republican Navy, and he was worthy of its old renown. A round shot had struck him on the back, tearing away the greater part of his left hip; the English boarders found him dying on his own quarter-deck. The private signal-code of the French Navy was in his pocket, and in his last moments of consciousness he endeavoured to destroy it; but he was Over hurried, for Death would not wait. Instead of the signal-code he drew out his commission, tried feebly to swallow it, and died. No man in any navy ever perished with more heroic devotion to duty; and the name of Jean Mullon is recorded as that of a man who was faithful unto death.

The Nymphe went into action with a crew of 240 officers and men, of whom the boatswain, Tobias James; Richard Pearse, master's mate; George Boyd, John Davie, and Samuel Edsall, midshipmen, with fourteen seamen and four marines, were killed. Second Lieutenant George Lake; John Norway and John Plaine, midshipmen; Lieutenant John Whitaker, of the Marines; seventeen seamen, and six Marines were wounded.

The Cléopâtre had 320 men on board at the commencement of the action, of whom sixty-three were either killed or wounded. Captain Pellew ended his letter to the Admiralty thus: I am very particularly indebted to my first lieutenant, Mr. Amherst Morris, and no less so to Lieutenants George Lake and Richard Pellowe; and I was ably seconded on the quarter-deck by Lieutenant John Whitaker, of the Marines, and Mr. Thomson, the master, and I hope I do not presume in recommending these officers to their lordships' protection and favour; and I should do injustice to my brother, Captain Israel Pellew, who was accidentally on board, if I could possibly omit saying how much I owe him for his very distinguished firmness, and the encouraging example he held forth to a young ship's company, by taking upon him the direction of some guns on the main-deck.'

To his brother, the collector at Falmouth, he wrote more freely: 'Dear Sam,-Here we are, thank God, safe, after a glorious action with the Cléopâtre, the crack ship of France, of forty guns, twenty-eight on her main-deck, twelve on her quarter-deck, some of thirty-six pounds, and 320 men. We dished her up in fifty minutes, boarded, and struck her colours. . . . I owe much to Israel, who undertook with the after guns to cut off her rudder and wheel. Her tiller was shot away and four men killed at her wheel, which I verily believe was owing to him. . . . Poor dear Pearse is numbered with the slain, Plaine and Norway slightly wounded, old Nicholls safe. God be praised for all His mercy to myself, Israel, and all of us.'

That battle of June 18, 1793, was the first decisive engagement in the great struggle whose end was not to be reached till another June 18, twenty-two years later. On Friday, the 21st, the Nymphe and her prize sailed into Portsmouth Harbour, cheered by the crews of all the ships they passed; and on the evening of Sunday, the 23rd, Captain Jean Mullon was buried by Captain Pellew in Portsmouth Churchyard.

It is good to know that Pellew not only paid him the last sad compliment of burial, but wrote, immediately after the action, to Madame Mullon. He learnt from her reply that the death of her husband left her and her five children in straitened circumstances, and when he returned her husband's property he added to it as much as his own limited means allowed him. She thanked him for his generosity, which I took care should be publicly known, as I sent a copy of your letter to the Minister.' She

asked for some details from the ship's accounts, for which addition to my obligation, I thank you beforehand'; and Pellew, always kind-hearted, seems to have found a melancholy pleasure in doing all he could to assist the widow and orphans of his chivalrous foe. Ten days after the action the brothers were presented to George III. by the Earl of Chatham; and the King was pleased to confer on one brother the honour of knighthood, and to make the other a post-captain. Amherst Morris, the first lieutenant, was made commander; and Thomson, the master, received the somewhat unusual honour of a lieutenant's commission.

In one of the best-known passages of his 'Peninsular War,' Napier speaks of the 'might and majesty' with which the British soldier fights. Majesty has never been a special characteristic of the British sailor, however mighty he may be. Not his the stiff discipline that regulates the courage of the German, nor the blood-fury that makes the Frenchman so dangerous in attack, so difficult to restrain when once he gets out of hand; but he has a method and a manner all his own. A sober devotion to duty and a cheerful alacrity in fight, nerves of steel and an obstinate persistence that never knows when it is beaten-these are the qualities that have made him what he is, and through him have built up the Empire. The Nymphe's crew were a haphazard collection of men, taken just as they came, by sea and land. They had neither the discipline nor the training of the man-of-war's man; many of them had never even learned sea-duty in the hard rough school of the merchant service; yet the first breath of war taught them to fight, and the spirit of discipline was inspired by every plank of the King's ship, every button of the King's uniform. The miner of a month ago, the merchant sailor of yesterday, took their place beside the seasoned seaman of the Royal Navy, and fought as well and as handily as he. That can never be done again; and therein lies our danger. The sailor can no longer be improvised: he can only be made by long and careful training, for he is the most scientifically educated fighting man that the world has yet seen. In the old days the scratch of a pen increased the personnel of the Navy from 16,000 to 60,000 men; and with much labour, much friction, and great individual hardship, the numbers were filled up with practical efficiency. That can never be done again. Neither labour, nor individual suffering, nor general hardship can create for us seamen or reserves. They must be made and ready at the outbreak of war, or we shall suffer for the want of them. W. J. FLETCHER.

AUSTRALIAN MEMORIES.

Now that a Dutchman's midsummer madness has fanned to flame a loyalty that in the piping times of peace smouldered almost unsuspected, linking Britain and her remotest offshoots in a bond so intimate that no sane coalition in the world will lightly meddle in its family affairs; now that Britons and Australians have fought and died together; now that an heir and heiress to the Imperial throne are to show themselves to their far-off subjects; now that we see as an accomplished fact that Imperial Federation which, when I knew the colonies, was whispered pityingly as a mirage of Downing Street and a chimera of dandy governors, it may be that some little interest in those wonderful southern homes will manifest itself in the northern headquarters of the race. English folk may soon acquire a familiarity, comparative at any rate, with Australian topography. No longer will they regard Melbourne as the capital of New South Wales, or Sydney as that of Tasmania : no longer perchance will outward-bound travellers, with Sydney as their goal, be commissioned to deliver family relics- all in your way; no trouble, now, is it?'-at Deniliquin or Ballarat, as once happened to the writer. Indeed, as the voyage becomes yearly less of an undertaking, it may be not unreasonably surmised that Australia will, between March and May, her visitors leaving England in the February fogs and returning in good time for Ascot and Cowes, gain in popularity as a winter resort, since at that season it is possible to see all that is best of colonial landscape in all that is best of colonial weather. Hundreds do it even to-day. A friend of mine once did the trip merely that he might be present at the last test-match of Mr. Stoddart's first team. True, he once went as far as Colombo simply to give some friends a prawn lunch, returning home next day. Some may feel. reluctant to make quite so much of life's opportunities, and I quote his case only as an illustration of what may be done in a short time.

A six months' absence from the northern hemisphere should be all-sufficient for a glimpse of Australia; and that which hundreds do to-day thousands will assuredly do before the new Commonwealth is ten years old. Apart from the wonderful land that lies at the end of the journey, the voyage itself is not without

interest for those who love the relaxation and kaleidoscopic variety of travel. Plymouth Breakwater, the towering Rock, the busy quays of Marseilles, the coal and glare and general disreputableness of Port Said, with the recurring cry, 'Any more for the shore, please?' are landmarks of more or less hackneyed type. Then, however, comes the always interesting first passage of the Canal, the first half with the gigantic electric beam swinging at the bow, the rest in the clear light of an Egyptian day, when passengers enjoy the variety of narrowing sand-banks, trim gares, perhaps a tie-up' in a siding, and, lastly, a halt off Suez (with much haggling with the forty thieves who swarm on board to trade in clipped ostrich feathers and other wonderful and unnecessary rubbish), before committing themselves to the longer run of the dangerous Red Sea-with the inevitable two parsons on board disputing the exact whereabouts of the great trek of the Israelites with their owners' property-even past Perim the accursed and Aden the double-damned. There are good-byes at Aden, for the transhipment of the Bombay contingent leaves the first gap in the pleasant company, and we shall lose more, indeed the smartest of the saloon's company, next Sunday at Colombo.

The day ashore at that murky port has been described about five thousand times in print; the short and shaky trip on the catamaran (which more write about than perform), the dusty passage in 'riksha or carriage to the Cinnamon Gardens or to the native quarter, or, again, to Mount Lavinia, where one may best spend the entire day drinking turtle-soup and eating large portions of a prawn curry that I have never known beaten. It is well that this day ashore has pleasant memories-including the purchase of false sapphires of the rogues in the bazaars of the G.O.H.-for the days that follow, terminating only with Albany (it is Fremantle, I believe, nowadays) and a send-off in the second saloon of the somewhat draggled pilgrims bound for the unholy shrine of Coolgardie, are the most wearisome of the voyage. Even the infinite flying-fishes and the albatrosses that follow astern with misguided zeal fail to attract the many amateur photographers of the company. One's recollections of Albany are all of the negative order, and the directors of the P. & O. Company are to be congratulated on having arrived at timely recognition of the undeniable fact that it is par excellence the port not to call at. Adelaide comes, at last, after some indescribably horrible rolling in the Bight, great green mountains of water speeding northward from the South