the Spaniards; though they were placed there as trophies of victories
won rather than for use. In truth, the old seaman's dwelling, full as
it was of many other warlike engines, had no pretensions to the
character of a fortress; it had been his fancy to gather within its
walls the spoils of many a hard-fought fight to remind him of days gone
by, especially when he had sailed out of Plymouth Sound in his stout
bark in company with the gallant Lord Howard, Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins,
and other brave seamen whose names are known to fame, to make fierce
onslaught on the vaunting Spaniards, as their proud Armada swept up the
Channel. The porch at the front entrance was adorned with Spanish
handiwork--a portion of the stern-gallery of the huge _Saint Nicholas_;
while at each corner of the building were fixed other parts of that
mighty galleon, or of some other ship of the many which had been, by
God's good providence, delivered into the hands of those whom the
haughty Spaniards came vainly threatening to enslave.

The house contained a good-sized dining-hall. At one end was a broad
fireplace, and mantelpiece supported by richly carved figures, also
taken from the stern-gallery of a Spanish bark. Above it appeared the
model of the _Golden Lion_, the captain's own ship. The walls were
adorned with breastplates and morions, swords and matchlocks, huge
pistols, with other weapons of curious form, and three banners captured
from the foe, regarded by the captain as the chiefest of his trophies.
Here, too, were also bows and arrows, spears and clubs, and various
implements, remembrances of the last voyage he had made to America.

The captain was walking to and fro in the shade. In his hand was a long
pipe with a huge bowl, from which he ever and anon sucked up a mouthful
of smoke, which, as he again puffed it out, rose in light wreaths above
his head. Sometimes, as he sent them forth slowly, now from one side of
his mouth, now from the other, as a ship fires her broadsides at her
foes, he would stop and gaze at the vanishing vapour, his thoughts
apparently wandering to distant times and regions far away, now taking a
glance down the Sound to watch for any tall ship which might be coming
up from the westward, now looking along the road.

His countenance, though that of a man still hale and hearty, showed
signs of many a hard fight with human foes and fierce storms, as far as
it could be distinguished amid the curling locks wh