to her adversary in his own tongue.

And both meant the same thing,--"We are ready."

It was England against the world. She had no ally, except the sixty
Dutch ships. And except, too, One who was invisible, but whom the winds
and the sea obeyed.

The aid required by Lord Howard came: not from Elizabeth, but from
England. Volunteers poured in from every shire,--men in velvet gowns
and gold chains, men in frieze jackets and leather jerkins. The
"delicate-handed, dilettante" Earl of Oxford; the "Wizard" Earl of
Northumberland, just come to his title; the eccentric Earl George of
Cumberland; Sir Thomas Cecil, elder son of the Lord High Treasurer
Burleigh,--weak-headed, but true-hearted; Sir Robert Cecil, his younger
brother,--strong-headed and false-hearted; and lastly, a host in
himself, Sir Walter Raleigh, whose fine head and, great heart few of his
contemporaries appreciated at their true value,--and perhaps least of
all the royal lady whom he served. These men came in one by one.

But the leather jerkins flocked in by hundreds; the men who were of no
account, whose names nobody cared to preserve, whose deeds nobody
thought of recording; yet who, after all, were England, and without whom
their betters would have made very poor head against the Armada. They
came, leaving their farms untilled, their forges cold, their axes and
hammers still. All that could wait till afterwards. Just now, England
must be saved.

From all the coast around, provisions were sent in, both of food and
munition: here a stand of arms from the squire's armoury, there a batch
of new bread from the yeoman's farm: those who could send but a chicken
or a cabbage did not hold them back; there were some who had nothing to
give but themselves--and that they gave. Every atom was accepted: they
all counted for something in the little isle's struggle to keep free.

It is the little things, after all, of which great things are made. Not
only the men who lined the decks of the "Ark Royal," but the women
ashore who baked their bread, and the children who gathered wood in the
forest for the ovens, were helping to save England.

Even some Recusants--which meant Romanists--came in with offerings of
food, arms, and service: men who, in being Romanists, had not forgotten
that they were Englishmen.

About noon on the twentieth of July, the Armada was first sighted from
Plymouth. She was supposed at first to be making direct, for that town.
But she