into the
darkness in which every man walks who hates his brother; and it lay upon
him like a black shadow day and night. No company, too, could be more
fit to darken that shadow than Salvation Yeo's. The old man grew more
stern in his fanaticism day by day, and found a too willing listener in
his master; and Mrs. Leigh was (perhaps for the first and last time
in her life) seriously angry, when she heard the two coolly debating
whether they had not committed a grievous sin in not killing the Spanish
prisoners on board the galleon.

It must be said, however (as the plain facts set down in this book
testify), that if such was the temper of Englishmen at that day,
the Spaniards had done a good deal to provoke it; and were just then
attempting to do still more.

For now we are approaching the year 1588, "which an astronomer of
Konigsberg, above a hundred years before, foretold would be an admirable
year, and the German chronologers presaged would be the climacterical
year of the world."

The prophecies may stand for what they are worth; but they were at least
fulfilled. That year was, indeed, the climacterical year of the world;
and decided once and for all the fortunes of the European nations, and
of the whole continent of America.

No wonder, then, if (as has happened in each great crisis of the human
race) some awful instinct that The Day of the Lord was at hand, some dim
feeling that there was war in heaven, and that the fiends of darkness
and the angels of light were arrayed against each other in some mighty
struggle for the possession of the souls of men, should have tried
to express itself in astrologic dreams, and, as was the fashion then,
attributed to the "rulers of the planetary houses" some sympathy with
the coming world-tragedy.

But, for the wise, there needed no conjunction of planets to tell them
that the day was near at hand, when the long desultory duel between
Spain and England would end, once and for all, in some great
death-grapple. The war, as yet, had been confined to the Netherlands, to
the West Indies, and the coasts and isles of Africa; to the quarters,
in fact, where Spain was held either to have no rights, or to have
forfeited them by tyranny. But Spain itself had been respected by
England, as England had by Spain; and trade to Spanish ports went on as
usual, till, in the year 1585, the Spaniard, without warning, laid an
embargo on all English ships coming to his European shores. They were t