little, half-forgotten, and more than half-ruined Syrian
town was the scene of one of the fiercest and most dramatic sieges
recorded in military history. And rarely has there been a struggle so
apparently one-sided. A handful of British sailors and Turkish
irregulars were holding Acre, a town without regular defences, against
Napoleon, the most brilliant military genius of his generation, with an
army of 10,000 war-hardened veterans, the "Army of Italy"--soldiers who
had dared the snows of the Alps and conquered Italy, and to whom
victory was a familiar experience. In their ranks military daring had
reached, perhaps, its very highest point. And yet the sailors inside
that ring of crumbling wall won! At the blood-stained trenches of Acre
Napoleon experienced his first defeat; and, years after, at St. Helena,
he said of Sir Sidney Smith, the gallant sailor who baffled him, "That
man made me miss my destiny." It is a curious fact that one Englishman
thwarted Napoleon's career in the East, and another ended his career in
the West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated
most--Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney
Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny,"
and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock in
the Atlantic.

Sidney Smith was a sailor of the school of Nelson and of Dundonald--a
man, that is, with a spark of that warlike genius which begins where
mechanical rules end. He was a man of singular physical beauty, with a
certain magnetism and fire about him which made men willing to die for
him, and women who had never spoken to him fall headlong in love with
him. His whole career is curiously picturesque. He became a middy at
the tender age of eleven years; went through fierce sea-fights, and was
actually mate of the watch when fourteen years old. He was a
fellow-middy with William IV. in the fight off Cape St. Vincent, became
commander when he was eighteen years of age, and captain before he was
quite nineteen. But the British marine, even in those tumultuous days,
scarcely yielded enough of the rapture of fighting to this post-captain
in his teens. He took service under the Swedish flag, saw hard
fighting against the Russians, became the close personal friend of the
King, and was knighted by him. One of the feats at this period of his
life with which tradition, with more or less of plausibility, credits
Sidney Smith, is t