olmaster here."

"Will he consent, think you, to your taking to a seafaring life?"

"Methinks he will, sir. He knows that my heart is set upon it, for
he hath often said if I loved my lessons with one-tenth of the love
I bear for the sea, I should make a good scholar, and be a credit
to him."

"I will not forget you, lad. Trust me, and when you hear of my
return, fail not to send a reminder, and to claim a place in my
next adventure."

Ned Hearne, delighted at the assurance, ran off at full speed to
the cottage where his father resided, at the end of the village.
The dominie, who was an old man, wore the huge tortoise-shell
rimmed spectacles of the time.

"Wet again," he said, as his son burst into the room in which he
was sitting, studying a Greek tome. "Truly thou earnest the name of
which thou art so proud, Otter, hardly. What tempted thee to go
into the water, on a day like this?"

Ned briefly explained what had taken place. The story was no
unusual one, for this was the third time that he had swum out to
vessels on the rocks between Westport and Plymouth. Then he related
to his father how Captain Francis Drake had spoken to him, and
praised him, and how he had promised that, on his next trip to the
West Indies, he would take him with him.

"I would not have you count too much upon that," the dominie said,
dryly. "It is like, indeed, that he may never come back from this
hare-brain adventure; and if he brings home his skin safe, he will,
methinks, have had enough of burning in the sun, and fighting the
Spaniards."

"But hath he not already made two or three voyages thither,
Father?" the boy asked.

"That is true enough," said his father; "but from what I gather,
these were mere trips to spy out the land. This affair on which he
starts now will be, I wot, a very different matter."

"How is it, Father," the boy said on the following morning,
resuming the conversation from the point which they were at when he
went up to change his wet clothes, the day before, "that when
England is at peace with Spain, our sailors and the Spanish do
fight bloodily, in the West Indies?"

"That, my son, is a point upon which the Roman law telleth us
nothing. I have, in my shelves, some very learned treatises on war;
but in none do I find mention of a state of things in which two
powers, at peace at home, do fight desperately at the extreme end
of the earth."

"But, Father, do you think it not lawful to kill the Spaniard,