together with the names of the military rum-selling traducers of the
good Phillip, and of ill-tempered, passionate sailor Bligh of the
_Bounty_--honest, brave, irascible, vindictive; destroyer of his ship's
company on that fateful adventure to Tahiti, hero of the most famous
boat-voyage the world has ever known; sea-bully and petty "hazer" of
hapless Fletcher Christian and his comrades, gallant officer in battle
and thanked by Nelson at Copenhagen; conscientious governor of a
starveling colony gasping under the hands of unscrupulous military
money-makers, William Bligh deserves to be remembered by all men of
English blood who are proud of the annals of the most glorious navy in
the world.

* * * * *

But ere we descend to the beach to wander by rock and pool in this
glowing Australian sun, the warm, loving rays of which are fast drying
the frost-coated grass, let us look at these square, old-time monuments
to the dead, placed on the Barrack Hill, and overlooking the sea. There
are four in all, but around them are many low, sunken headstones of
lichen-covered slabs, the inscriptions on which, like many of those on
the stones in the cemetery by the reedy creek, have long since vanished.

There, indeed, if you care to brave the snake-haunted place you will
discover a word, or the part of a word--"Talav----," "Torre----Vedras,"
"Vimiera," or "Badaj----," or "Fuentes de On----," and you know that
underneath lies the dust of men who served their country well when the
Iron Duke was rescuing Europe from the grip of the bloodstained
Corsican. On one, which for seventy years has faced the rising sun and
the salty breath of the ocean breeze, there remains but the one glorious
word, "Aboukir!" every indented letter thickly filled with grey moss and
lichen, though the name of he who fought there has disappeared, and
being but that of some humble seaman, is unrecorded and unknown in the
annals of his country. How strange it seems! but yet how fitting that
this one word alone should be preserved by loving Nature from the
decaying touch of Time. Perhaps the very hand of the convict mason who
held the chisel to the stone struck deeper as he carved the letters of
the name of the glorious victory.

But let us away from here; for in the hot summer months amid these
neglected and decaying memorials of the dead, creeping and crawling in
and out of the crumbling masonry of the tombs, gliding among the long,