After that he began to make reprisals,
according to his manner, taking no trouble to regard the women--which
debarred them from thinking much of him--but settling with a steady
gaze at each sea-faring man, whether he was made of good stuff or of
pie-crust. And to the credit of the place it must be said that he found
very little of that soft material, but plenty of good stuff, slow,
perhaps, and heavy, but needing only such a soul as his to rouse it.
"What a fine set of fellows you have in your village!" he said to Miss
Darling after dinner, as she sat at the head of her father's table,
for the Admiral had long been a widower. "The finest I have seen on
the south coast anywhere. And they look as if they had been under some
training. I suppose your father had most of them in the Fencibles, last
summer?"
"Not one of them," Faith answered, with a sweet smile of pride. "They
have their own opinions, and nothing will disturb them. Nobody could get
them to believe for a moment that there was any danger of invasion. And
they carried on all their fishing business almost as calmly as they do
now. For that, of course, they may thank you, Lord Nelson; but they have
not the smallest sense of the obligation."
"I am used to that, as your father knows; but more among the noble than
the simple. For the best thing I ever did I got no praise, or at any
rate very little. As to the Boulogne affair, Springhaven was quite
right.
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