and having to hark out for the
_frish-frish-frish_-like of a Spanish galliwopses' oars creepin' up on
ye. Frankie 'ud have the tiller and Moon he'd peer forth at the bows,
our lantern under his skirts, till the boat we was lookin' for 'ud blurt
up out o' the dark, and we'd lay hold and haul aboard whoever
'twas--man, woman, or babe,--an' round we'd go again, the wind bewling
like a kite in our riggin's, and they'd drop into the hold and praise
God for happy deliverance till they was all sick.

'I had nigh a year at it, an' we must have fetched off--oh, a hundred
pore folk, I reckon. Outrageous bold, too, Frankie growed to be.
Outrageous cunning he was. Once we was as near as nothing nipped by a
tall ship off Tergo Sands in a snowstorm. She had the wind of us, and
spooned straight before it, shooting all bow guns. Frankie fled inshore
smack for the beach, till he was atop of the first breakers. Then he
hove his anchor out, which nigh tore our bows off, but it twitched us
round end-for-end into the wind, d'ye see, an' we clawed off them sands
like a drunk man rubbin' along a tavern bench. When we could see, the
Spanisher was laid flat along in the breakers with the snows whitening
on his wet belly. He thought he could go where Frankie went.'

'What happened to the crew?' said Una.

'We didn't stop,' Simon answered. 'There was a very liddle new baby in
our hold, and the mother, she wanted to get to some dry bed middlin'
quick. We runned into Dover, and said nothing.'

'Was Sir Francis Drake very much pleased?'

'Heart alive, maid, he'd no head to his name in those days. He was just
a outrageous, valiant, crop-haired, tutt-mouthed boy roarin' up an' down
the narrer seas, with his beard not yet quilled out. He made a
laughing-stock of everything all day, and he'd hold our lives in the
bight of his arm all the besom-black night among they Dutch sands; and
we'd ha' jumped overside to behove him any one time, all of us.'

'Then why did you try to poison him?' Una asked wickedly, and Simon hung
his head like a shy child.

'Oh, that was when he set me to make a pudden, for because our cook was
hurted. _I_ done my uttermost, but she all fetched adrift like in the
bag, an' the more I biled the bits of her, the less she favoured any
fashion o' pudden. Moon he chawed and chammed his piece, and Frankie
chawed and chammed his'n, and--no words to it--he took me by the ear an'
walked me out over the bow-end, an' him an' Moon hove