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 quilted 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 the pudden at me on
the bowsprit gub by gub, something cruel hard!' Simon rubbed his hairy
cheek.

'"Nex' time you bring me anything," says Frankie, "you bring me
cannon-shot an' I'll know what I'm getting." But as for poisonin'--' He
stopped, the children laughed so.

'Of course you didn't,' said Una. 'Oh, Simon, we do like you!'

'I was always likeable with children.' His smile crinkled up through the
hair round his eyes. 'Simple Simon they used to call me through our yard
gates.'

'Did Sir Francis mock you?' Dan asked.

'Ah, no. He was gentle-born. Laugh he did--he was always laughing--but
not so as to hurt a feather. An' I loved 'en. I loved 'en before England
knew 'en, or Queen Bess she broke his heart.'

'But he hadn't really done anything when you knew him, had he?' Una
insisted. 'Armadas and those things, I mean.'

Simon pointed to the scars and scrapes left by Cattiwow's great log.
'You tell me that that good ship's timber never done nothing against
winds and weathers since her up-springing, and I'll confess ye that
young Frankie never done nothing neither. Nothing? He adventured and
suffered and made shift on they Dutch sands as much in any one month
as ever he had occasion for to do in a half-year on the high seas
afterwards. An' what was his tools? A coaster boat--a liddle box o'
walty plankin' an' some few fathom feeble rope held together an' made
able by him sole. He drawed our spirits up In our bodies same as a
chim