OK THE COMMUNION UNDER THE TREE AT HIGUEROTE

XXII. THE INQUISITION IN THE INDIES

XXIII. THE BANKS OF THE META

XXIV. HOW AMYAS WAS TEMPTED OF THE DEVIL

XXV. HOW THEY TOOK THE GOLD-TRAIN

XXVI. HOW THEY TOOK THE GREAT GALLEON

XXVII. HOW SALVATION YEO FOUND HIS LITTLE MAID AGAIN

XXVIII.HOW AMYAS CAME HOME THE THIRD TIME

XXIX. HOW THE VIRGINIA FLEET WAS STOPPED BY THE QUEEN'S COMMAND

XXX. HOW THE ADMIRAL JOHN HAWKINS TESTIFIED AGAINST CROAKERS

XXXI. THE GREAT ARMADA

XXXII. HOW AMYAS THREW HIS SWORD INTO THE SEA

XXXIII. HOW AMYAS LET THE APPLE FALL

WESTWARD HO!

CHAPTER I

HOW MR. OXENHAM SAW THE WHITE BIRD

"The hollow oak our palace is,
Our heritage the sea."

All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must
needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from
its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge
where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the
west. Above the town the hills close in, cushioned with deep oak woods,
through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed slate; below
they lower, and open more and more in softly rounded knolls, and fertile
squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide expanse of hazy
flats, rich salt-marshes, and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins
her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly toward the broad surges
of the bar, and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.
Pleasantly the old town stands there, beneath its soft Italian sky,
fanned day and night by the fresh ocean breeze, which forbids alike the
keen winter frosts, and the fierce thunder heats of the midland; and
pleasantly it has stood there for now, perhaps, eight hundred years
since the first Grenville, cousin of the Conqueror, returning from the
conquest of South Wales, drew round him trusty Saxon serfs, and free
Norse rovers with their golden curls, and dark Silurian Britons from
the Swansea shore, and all the mingled blood which still gives to the
seaward folk of the next county their strength and intellect, and, even
in these levelling days, their peculiar beauty of face and form.

But at the time whereof I write, Bideford was not merely a pleasant
country town, whose quay was haunted by a few coasting craft. It was
one of the chief ports of England; it furnished seven ships to fight the
Armada: even more than a century afterwar