ance; and
when I sprang, sword in hand, down upon her deck, I was met by a mere
lad, his beardless face deadly pale, his head bound up in a blood-sodden
bandage, and his right arm hanging helpless--and broken--by his side.
With his left hand he tendered to me his sword, in silence, and then,
turning away, burst into tears.

And as I looked around me I could well understand the cause of the poor
young fellow's emotion. It was not only that this fine, handsome ship--
brand-new, as it turned out, and only commissioned a few days
previously--was a perfect wreck aloft, but the dead and wounded were
lying about her decks, especially in the vicinity of the stump of the
foremast, in heaps. Her bulwarks were shot through and through; her
wheel was smashed to pieces; and there were long scorings fore-and-aft
her decks, showing the paths that our eighteen-pound shot had ploughed
up in their destructive passage. But even this was not the worst of it;
for when I turned to the young officer and tried to soothe him by the
utterance of some platitude having reference to "the fortune of war", he
informed me that, although he had that morning been the ship's junior
lieutenant, he was now the senior surviving officer; the captain and the
other lieutenants being among the killed.

"And to think," he ejaculated bitterly, "that we should have been
compelled to strike to such an insignificant craft as that!" pointing to
the schooner. "But," he added, "you did not fight fair; you never gave
us a chance. Had you but once fairly come within range of our guns we
would have blown you out of the water!"

"Precisely!" I agreed; "we were well aware of that, monsieur, and,
therefore, we preferred to fight you at a respectful distance. And
now," I continued, "as I have relieved you of your command, let me beg
you to lose no time in going below to the surgeon to get your hurts
attended to; I am sure that France can ill afford to lose so brave a man
as yourself."

The poor fellow smiled wanly at my clumsy compliment, and with a bow
turned away to follow my suggestion; while I went to work to get the
prisoners disarmed and secured below. This was managed without
difficulty; the French appearing to be too utterly downcast and broken-
spirited to dream of resisting us after having hauled down their
colours; and I was not surprised at this when I shortly afterwards
learned that, out of a crew numbering two hundred and eighty-four, she
had lost n