ing anything
until their "to-morrow" shall arrive. All the credit is due to him,
and to him alone, for our admiral never left his ship, which was
anchored three miles from the shore, and contented himself with sending
the same contingent of men and boats as the other ships.' And, writing
again after the landing had been effected, Delane says, 'Remember
always, that, in the great credit which the success of this landing
deserves, Dundas has no share. Lyons has done all, and this in spite
of discouragement such as a smaller man would have resented. Nelson
could not have done better, and, indeed, his case at Copenhagen nearly
resembles this.' Here, then, is a feather in the cap of the first
mate. He may often save a vital situation which, in the hands of a
dilatory skipper, might easily have been lost. The skipper is skipper,
and knows it. He is at the top of the tree, and there remains nothing
to struggle after. He is apt to rest on his laurels and lose his
energy. This subtle tendency is the first mate's opportunity. The
ship must not be lost because the skipper goes to sleep. Everything,
at such an hour, depends on the first mate.

Nor is it only in time of war and of crisis that the first mate comes
to his own. In the arts of peace the selfsame principle holds good.
What could our literature have done without the first mate? And in the
republic of letters the first mate is usually a woman. It is only
quite lately that women have, to any appreciable extent, applied
themselves to the tasks and responsibilities of authorship. Until well
into the eighteenth century, Mrs. Grundy scowled out of countenance any
intrepid female who threatened to invade the sacred domain. In 1778,
however, Miss Fanny Burney braved the old lady's wrath, published
_Evelina_, and became the pioneer of a new epoch. One of these days,
perhaps on the bi-centenary of that event, the army of women who wield
the pen will erect a statue to the memory of that courageous and
brilliant pathfinder. When they do so, two memorable scenes in the
life of their heroine will probably be represented in bas-relief upon
the pedestal. The one will portray Miss Burney, hopeless of ever
inducing a biased public to read a woman's work, making a bonfire of
the manuscripts to which she had devoted such patient care. The other
will illustrate the famous scene when Miss Burney danced a jig to Daddy
Crisp round the great mulberry-tree at Chessington. It