HORATIO, VISCOUNT NELSON.
Birth.-Boyhood.-His first service.-The Raisonnable.-In the West Indies.-The Triumph -The North-Pole expedition.-East Indies. -His M.A. degree.-Lieutenant of the Lowestoffe. In the Bristol.The Badger. At Jamaica.-In the Hinchinbrook.-At San Juan.— The Janus.-Home.-The North Sea.-America.-West Indies.The Captain on half-pay.
BUT a few miles from the little port of Wells, on the Norfolk coast, lies the village of Burnham Thorpe, of which the Rev. Edmund Nelson was rector during the latter half of the last century. Five children had already been born to him in his pretty parsonage, when, on the 29th of September, 1758, a weak, sickly boy was added to his family, and baptized Horatio. Within nine years of this event, the rector of Burnham was a widower. Eight children were left to him out of eleven, and he gladly accepted the offer of his brother-in-law, Captain Suckling, to take care of one of his boys. By his own free choice, the weak, sickly Horatio was his uncle's protégé. Sent at first to the High School at Norwich, and afterwards removed to that at North Walsham; as a mere boy he had shown an utter absence of fear, a resolute heart, and a strong sense of honour. When his grandmother had expressed her surprise that fear had not driven him home from a long and dangerous ramble; "Fear," said the child, with evident astonishment, "What is fear-I never saw it; " and when, on another occasion, his father left it to his