of the Trust, and to
Oxford he shall go this autumn, or else to Exeter gaol, for a strong
rogue, and a masterless man. Do you hear?"

"Hear?--oh, sir, yes! and return thanks. Jack shall go, Sir Richard,
doubt it not--I were mad else; and, Sir Richard, may I go too?"

And therewith Vindex vanished, and Sir Richard enjoyed a second mighty
laugh, which brought in Lady Grenville, who possibly had overheard the
whole; for the first words she said were--

"I think, my sweet life, we had better go up to Burrough."

So to Burrough they went; and after much talk, and many tears, matters
were so concluded that Amyas Leigh found himself riding joyfully towards
Plymouth, by the side of Sir Richard, and being handed over to Captain
Drake, vanished for three years from the good town of Bideford.

And now he is returned in triumph, and the observed of all observers;
and looks round and round, and sees all faces whom he expects, except
one; and that the one which he had rather see than his mother's? He is
not quite sure. Shame on himself!

And now the prayers being ended, the rector ascends the pulpit, and
begins his sermon on the text:--

"The heaven and the heaven of heavens are the Lord's; the whole earth
hath he given to the children of men;" deducing therefrom craftily, to
the exceeding pleasure of his hearers, the iniquity of the Spaniards
in dispossessing the Indians, and in arrogating to themselves the
sovereignty of the tropic seas; the vanity of the Pope of Rome in
pretending to bestow on them the new countries of America; and the
justice, valor, and glory of Mr. Drake and his expedition, as testified
by God's miraculous protection of him and his, both in the Straits of
Magellan, and in his battle with the Galleon; and last, but not least,
upon the rock by Celebes, when the Pelican lay for hours firmly fixed,
and was floated off unhurt, as it were by miracle, by a sudden shift of
wind.

Ay, smile, reader, if you will; and, perhaps, there was matter for a
smile in that honest sermon, interlarded, as it was, with scraps of
Greek and Hebrew, which no one understood, but every one expected as
their right (for a preacher was nothing then who could not prove himself
"a good Latiner"); and graced, moreover, by a somewhat pedantic and
lengthy refutation from Scripture of Dan Horace's cockney horror of the
sea--

"Illi robur et aes triplex," etc.

and his infidel and ungodly slander against the impias rates, and thei