"Malta, my dear Sir, is in my thoughts sleeping or waking." The Portuguese, he tells him, are ordered home; but, wishing Russian assistance, he does not say that he has stopped them,--as to which, indeed, he could not feel sure.
The same object pressed upon him while in Port Mahon, and he succeeded, by his personal enthusiasm, in arousing Erskine's interest in the matter; but the latter was loaded to the muzzle with objections.

"Sir James," said Nelson to Troubridge, with the amusing professional prejudice they both entertained, "enters upon the difficulty of the undertaking in a true soldier way." "I am just come from Sir James," he wrote to Hamilton on the 13th of October.

"He sees all the difficulty of taking Malta in the clearest point of views, and therefore it became an arduous task to make him think that with God's blessing the thing was possible." He has, however, consented to prepare fifteen hundred men with stores and equipments, but only on condition that the Russians will also give a thousand,--a further draft on Nelson's diplomacy,--and a thousand be landed from the squadron, etc.

Besides, there is the further difficulty that a superior officer is expected from England, and what will he say?
And will Erskine be justified in sending men before his entirely uncertain arrival?
It may be imagined what such proceedings were to Nelson's nervous, ardent, unhesitating temperament, and they elicited the characteristic comment, "This has been my first conference.

It has cost me four hours hard labour, and may be upset by a fool." "My heart is, I assure you, almost broke with this and other things," he wrote to Spencer.