has springs on her cables."

"Not she. I have ordered her to be docked. Dine with us you shall this

day, if we have to dine two hours earlier, and though Mother Cloam rage

furiously. How much longer do you suppose you can carry on at this pace?

Look at me. I have double your bodily substance; but if I went on as

you do--you remember the twenty-four-pounder old Hotcoppers put into the

launch, and fired it, in spite of all I could say to him? Well, you are

just the same. You have not got the scantling for the metal you carry

and are always working. You will either blow up, or else scuttle

yourself. Look here, how your seams are opening!" Here Admiral Darling

thrust his thumb through the ravelled seam of his old friend's coat,

which made him jump back, for he loved his old coat. "Yes, and you will

go in the very same way. I wonder how any coat lasts so much as a month,

with you inside it."

"This coat," said Nelson, who was most sweet-tempered with any one he

loved, though hot as pepper when stirred up by strangers--"this coat is

the one I wore at Copenhagen, and a sounder and kinder coat never came

on a man's back. Charles Darling, you have made a bad hit this time.

If I am no more worn out than this coat is, I am fit to go to sea for a

number of years yet. And I hope to show it to a good many Frenchmen, and

take as many ships, every time they show fight, as there are buttons on

it."

"Then you will double all your captures at the Nile;" such a series of

buttons had this coat, though mostly loose upon their moorings, for his

guardian angel was not "domestic"; "but you may be trusted not to let

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