"free from affectation." But one
historian not only says this, he adds: "She was the protector of her
country, and the prudent executor of its will." She was nothing of the
sort; on the contrary, she was a cold, greedy, heartless termagant, who
risked the loss of her country by her parsimony, and it was only saved
by the dauntless courage of the famishing seamen. I think that is one
of the most gruesome and humiliating pieces of British history: for the
monarch of a great empire to exhibit herself in the light of a sailor's
boarding-housekeeper; squeezing his life's blood out, and herself
handing down to posterity a character for meanness that would put to
the blush the owner of a collier brig whose main idea of economy may be
starving his crew. When I hear her spoken of as the Good Queen Bess, I
think of how she ordered the Puritan lawyer, John Stubbs, and the
printer of his pamphlet to be led to the scaffold and have their right
hands driven off by the wrist with a butcher's knife and mallet, and
how in God's name she commits many other unspeakable acts of
devilishness, the most dastardly of which was her refusal to provide
food for the thousands of brave men who saved her and her kingdom. What
a contrast between this woman and the great Queen Victoria, whose long
career is free from a single act of cruelty, and whose whole life teems
with good deeds, while Elizabeth's reeks with an odour so bad that no
student of history can peruse the account without wondering why she was
allowed to live; for truly she was as bad a shrew as ever wore a skirt!

IX

MISCELLANEOUS

Fifty or sixty years ago the N.E. coast ports were all tidal; no
harbours of refuge; no twenty-four feet on any of the bars at low water
as there is now; no piers or breakwaters projecting as they do to-day
far into the German Ocean. It therefore frequently happened that during
neap tides there was not sufficient water over the bars for even the
shallowest drafted vessels. In that case, if the weather was fine,
i.e., wind off the land, and smooth water, the vessels were taken
outside, and the balance of their cargoes sent to them by a peculiar
type of lighter known in that part of England by the name of keels.
These craft were skilfully managed by two men called keelmen, who
worked them up and down the stream with the tide and manipulated them
with long oars. One of these lighters was being rushed out of the river
by a heavy westerly wind and a c