The other recorded occurrence shows in the lad that indifference to personal benefit, as distinguished from the sense of conspicuous achievement, which was ever a prominent characteristic of the man.

The master of his school had a very fine pear-tree, whose fruit the boys coveted, but upon which none dared hazard an attempt.
At last Nelson, who did not share their desires, undertook the risk, climbed the tree by night, and carried off the pears, but refused to eat any of them,--saying that he had taken them only because the others were afraid.
Trivial though these incidents may seem, they are so merely because they belong to the day of small things.

To those accustomed to watch children, they will not appear unworthy of note.

Taken together, they illustrate, as really as do his greatest deeds, the two forms assumed at different times by the one incentive which always most powerfully determined Nelson's action through life,--the motive to which an appeal was never made in vain.

No material considerations, neither danger on the one hand, nor gain on the other, ever affected him as did that idealized conception which presented itself, now as duty, now as honor, according as it bore for the moment upon his relations to the state or to his own personality.