manner dispersed to the places allotted them
when not at the guns.
    And now it was full day. The fleece of low-hanging vapour had vanished,
licked up by the sun that late had so glorified it. And the circumambient air in
the clearness of its serenity was like smooth white marble in the polished block
not yet removed from the marble-dealer's yard.
 

                                      XXIV

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in
a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth
uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of
such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.
    How it fared with the Handsome Sailor during the year of the Great Mutiny
has been faithfully given. But though properly the story ends with his life,
something in way of sequel will not be amiss. Three brief chapters will suffice.
    In the general re-christening under the Directory of the craft originally
forming the navy of the French Monarchy, the St. Louis line-of-battle ship was
named the Athéiste. Such a name, like some other substituted ones in the
Revolutionary fleet, while proclaiming the infidel audacity of the ruling power,
was yet, though not so intended to be, the aptest name, if one consider it, ever
given to a warship; far more so indeed than the Devastation, the Erebus (the
Hell), and similar names bestowed upon fighting-ships.
    On the return passage to the English fleet from the detached cruise during
which occurred the events already recorded, the Indomitable fell in with the
Athéiste. An engagement ensued, during which Captain Vere, in the act of putting
his ship alongside the enemy with a view of throwing his boarders across the
bulwarks, was hit by a musket-ball from a port-hole of the enemy's main cabin.
More than disabled, he dropped to the deck and was carried below to the same
cock-pit where some of his men already lay. The senior lieutenant took command.
Under him the enemy was finally captured, and though much crippled, was by rare
good fortune successfully taken into Gibraltar, an English port not very distant
from the scene of the fight. There Captain Vere with the rest of the wounded was
put ashore. He lingered for some days, but the end came. Unhappily he was cut
off too early for the Nile and Trafalgar. The spirit that 'spite its philosophic
austerity may yet have indulged in the most secret of all passions, ambition,
never attained to the fulness of fame.
    Not long before