f arms, and noteworthy for many
strange knickknacks, Spanish gold and silver vessels on the sideboard;
strange birds and skins, and charts and rough drawings of coast which
hung about the room; while over the fireplace, above the portrait of old
Captain Will Hawkins, pet of Henry the Eighth, hung the Spanish ensign
which Captain John had taken in fair fight at Rio de la Hacha fifteen
years before, when, with two hundred men, he seized the town in despite
of ten hundred Spanish soldiers, and watered his ship triumphantly at
the enemy's wells.

The gentleman was a tall fair man, with a broad and lofty forehead,
wrinkled with study, and eyes weakened by long poring over the crucible
and the furnace.

The lady had once been comely enough, but she was aged and worn, as
sailors' wives are apt to be, by many sorrows. Many a sad day had she
had already; for although John Hawkins, port-admiral of Plymouth, and
patriarch of British shipbuilders, was a faithful husband enough, and
as ready to forgive as he was to quarrel, yet he was obstinate and
ruthless, and in spite of his religiosity (for all men were religious
then) was by no means a "consistent walker."

And sadder days were in store for her, poor soul. Nine years hence she
would be asked to name her son's brave new ship, and would christen it
The Repentance, giving no reason in her quiet steadfast way (so says
her son Sir Richard) but that "Repentance was the best ship in which
we could sail to the harbor of heaven;" and she would hear that Queen
Elizabeth, complaining of the name for an unlucky one, had re-christened
her The Dainty, not without some by-quip, perhaps, at the character
of her most dainty captain, Richard Hawkins, the complete seaman and
Euphuist afloat, of whom, perhaps, more hereafter.

With sad eyes Mrs. (then Lady) Hawkins would see that gallant bark sail
Westward-ho, to go the world around, as many another ship sailed; and
then wait, as many a mother beside had waited, for the sail which never
returned; till, dim and uncertain, came tidings of her boy fighting for
four days three great Armadas (for the coxcomb had his father's heart in
him after all), a prisoner, wounded, ruined, languishing for weary years
in Spanish prisons. And a sadder day than that was in store, when a
gallant fleet should round the Ram Head, not with drum and trumpet, but
with solemn minute-guns, and all flags half-mast high, to tell her
that her terrible husband's work was don