her swinging rostrum. "Do
you know it, too? I love it--I love every word of it--listen," And I,
who knew her good memory, and the spell that the music of a noble poem
cast over her, settled myself with resignation. I was quite sure that,
short of throwing her overboard, she would recite that poem from
beginning to end. And she did. Her skirts and her hair blowing, her eyes
full of the glory of that old "forlorn hope," gazing out past us to the
seas that had borne the hero, she said it.

At Flores in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a frightened bird, came flying from far away;
Spanish ships of war at sea, we have sighted fifty-three!
Then up spake Sir Thomas Howard
"'Fore God, I am no coward"--

She went on and on with the brave, beautiful story. How Sir Thomas would
not throw away his six ships of the line in a hopeless fight against
fifty-three; how yet Sir Richard, in the Revenge, would not leave behind
his "ninety men and more, who were lying sick ashore"; how at last Sir
Thomas

sailed away
With five ships of war that day
Till they melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven,
But Sir Richard bore in hand
All his sick men from the land,
Very carefully and slow,
Men of Bideford in Devon--
And he laid them on the ballast down below;
And they blessed him in their pain
That they were not left to Spain,
To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

The boat sailed softly, steadily now, as if it would not jar the rhythm
of the voice telling, with soft inflections, with long, rushing meter,
the story of that other Revenge, of the men who had gone from these
shores, under the great Sir Richard, to that glorious death.

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer
sea,
And not one moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.
Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons
came;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with their battle thunder and
flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and
her shame;
For some they sunk, and many they shattered so they could fight no
more.
God of battles! Was ever a battle like this in the world before?

As I listened, though I knew the words almost, by heart too, my eyes
filled with tears and my soul with the desire to have been t