ons and preparing for a siege.

The plan, then, was simple; but, for an equally simple reason, it
miscarried in the following manner. Early in August, while the French
armies from the Rhine to the Meuse were being punished with frightful
regularity and precision, the French Mediterranean squadron had sailed
up and down that interesting expanse of water, apparently in patriotic
imitation of the historic

"King of France and twenty thousand men."
For, it now appeared, the French admiral was afraid that the Spanish
navy might aid the German ships in harassing the French transports,
which at that time were frantically engaged in ferrying a sea-sick
Algerian army across the Mediterranean to the mother country.

Of course there was no ground for the admiral's suspicions. The German
war-ships stayed in their own harbors, the Spaniards made no offensive
alliance with Prussia, and at length the French admiral sailed
triumphantly away with his battleships and cruisers.

On the 7th of August the squadron of four battleships, two armored
corvettes, and a despatch-boat steamed out of Brest, picking up on its
way northward three more iron-clad frigates, and several cruisers and
despatch-boats; and on the 11th of August, 1870, the squadron anchored
off Heligoland, from whence Admiral Fourichon proclaimed the blockade
of the German coast.

It must have been an imposing sight! There lay the great iron-clads,
the _Magnanime_, the _Heroine_, the _Provence_, the _Valeureuse_, the
_Revanche_, the _Invincible_, the _Couronne_! There lay the cruisers,
the _Atalante_, the _Renaud_, the _Cosmao_, the _Decres_! There, too,
lay the single-screw despatch-boats _Reine-Hortense_, _Renard_, and
_Dayot_. And upon their armored decks, three by three, stalked the
French admirals. Yet, without cynicism, it may be said that the
admirals of France fought better, in 1870, on dry land than they did
on the ocean.

However, the German ships stayed peacefully inside their fortified
ports, and the three French admirals pranced peacefully up and down
outside, until the God of battles intervened and trouble naturally
ensued.

On the 6th of September all the seas of Europe were set clashing under
a cyclone that rose to a howling hurricane. The British iron-clad
_Captain_ foundered off Finistere; the French fleet in the Baltic was
scattered to the four winds.

In the midst of the tempest a French despatch-boat, the _Hirondelle_,
staggered int