and daughter then? Yes. The sacred
fire of sorrow was fast burning out all Ayacanora's fallen savageness;
and, like a Phoenix, the true woman was rising from those ashes, fair,
noble, and all-enduring, as God had made her.

CHAPTER XXX

HOW THE ADMIRAL JOHN HAWKINS TESTIFIED AGAINST CROAKERS

"Oh, where be these gay Spaniards,
Which make so great a boast O?
Oh, they shall eat the gray-goose feather,
And we shall eat the roast O!"

Cornish Song.

What if the spectators who last summer gazed with just pride upon the
noble port of Plymouth, its vast breakwater spanning the Sound, its
arsenals and docks, its two estuaries filled with gallant ships, and
watched the great screw-liners turning within their own length by force
invisible, or threading the crowded fleets with the ease of the tiniest
boat,--what if, by some magic turn, the nineteenth century, and all the
magnificence of its wealth and science, had vanished--as it may vanish
hereafter--and they had found themselves thrown back three hundred years
into the pleasant summer days of 1588?

Mount Edgecombe is still there, beautiful as ever: but where are the
docks, and where is Devonport? No vast dry-dock roofs rise at the
water's edge. Drake's island carries but a paltry battery, just raised
by the man whose name it bears; Mount Wise is a lone gentleman's house
among fields; the citadel is a pop-gun fort, which a third-class steamer
would shell into rubble for an afternoon's amusement. And the shipping,
where are they? The floating castles of the Hamoaze have dwindled to
a few crawling lime-hoys; and the Catwater is packed, not as now, with
merchant craft, but with the ships who will to-morrow begin the greatest
sea-fight which the world has ever seen.

There they lie, a paltry squadron enough in modern eyes; the largest of
them not equal in size to a six-and-thirty-gun frigate, carrying less
weight of metal than one of our new gun-boats, and able to employ even
that at not more than a quarter of our modern range. Would our modern
spectators, just come down by rail for a few hours, to see the cavalry
embark, and return tomorrow in time for dinner, have looked down upon
that petty port, and petty fleet, with a contemptuous smile, and begun
some flippant speech about the progress of intellect, and the triumphs
of science, and our benighted ancestors? They would have done so, doubt
it not, if they belong