of land which runs
out into the river at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches,
there has stood for some centuries the Manor House of Greenaway. The
water runs deep all the way to it from the sea, and the largest vessels
may ride with safety within a stone's throw of the windows. In the
latter half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in the hall of
this mansion, a party as remarkable as could have been found anywhere in
England. Humfrey and Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter
Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
Long Stream, in the summer evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide
to the port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows
of the ships which thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening,
with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth beyond the
sunset. And here in later life, matured men, whose boyish dreams had
become heroic action, they used again to meet in the intervals of quiet,
and the rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked the
first tobacco. Another remarkable man could not fail to have made a
fourth at these meetings. A sailor-boy of Sandwich, the adjoining
parish, John Davis, showed early a genius which could not have escaped
the eye of such neighbours, and in the atmosphere of Greenaway he
learned to be as noble as the Gilberts, and as tender and delicate as
Raleigh.

In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on his first voyage into the Polar
Seas; and twice subsequently he went again, venturing in small,
ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the most dangerous
seas. These voyages were as remarkable for their success as for the
daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis' epitaph is written
on the map of the world, where his name still remains to commemorate his
discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a peculiar and
exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little facts of his
life, seems to have affected every one with whom he came in contact in a
remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of Master Davis, leaving
their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or motion; we find
silver bullets cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard, rude natures of
the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage which was not like
that of a common man. He has written the account of one of his northern
voyages himself; and there is an imaginative beauty in