obisher's men, after grinding a night and
a day among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come
down and split them, but toiling through the long hours,
himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles
and planks, with death glaring at them out of the ice
rocks, and so saving themselves and it. Icebergs were
strong, Spaniards were strong, and storms, and corsairs,
and rocks, and reefs, which no chart had then noted--
they were all strong, but God was stronger, and that was
all which they cared to know.

Out of the vast number it is difficult to make wise
selections, but the attention floats loosely over
generalities, and only individual men can seize it and hold
it fast. We shall attempt to bring our readers face to
face with some of these men; not, of course, to write
their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few
scenes, in the hope that they may tempt those under
whose eyes they may fall to look for themselves to
complete the perfect figure.

Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once
among the most important harbours in England, on a
projecting angle 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, of
whom we shall presently speak more closely, 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