we fare
Free as the winds are free.
Our keels are bright with elfin gold
That mocks the tyrant's gaze,
That slips from out his greedy hold
And leaves him in amaze.

White water creaming past her prow
The little _Golden Hynde_
Bears westward with her treasure now--
We'd ship and follow blind,
But that he never did require--
Our Captain hath us bound
Only by force of his desire--
The quarry hunts the hound!

The hunt is up, the hunt is up
To the gray Atlantic's bound,--
The health of the Queen in a golden cup!--
The quarry is hunting the hound!
Like steel the stars gleam through the night
On armored waves beneath,--
As England's honor cold and bright
We bear her sword in sheath!

When that great Empire dies away
And none recall her place,
Men shall remember our work to-day
And tell of our Captain's grace,--
How never a woman or child was the worse
Wherever our foe we found,
Nor their own priests had cause to curse
The quarry that hunted the hound!

XV

THE FLEECE OF GOLD

White fog, the thick mist of windless marshes, masked the Kentish coast.
The Medway at flood-tide from Sheerness to Gillingham Reach was one maze
of creeks and bends and inlets and tiny bays. Nothing was visible an
oar's length overside but shifting cloudy shapes that bulked obscurely
in the fog. But although this was Francis Drake's first voyage as master
of his own ship, he knew these waters as he knew the palm of his hand.
His old captain, dying a bachelor, had left him the weather-beaten
cargo-ship as reward for his "diligence and fidelity", and at sixteen he
was captain where six years before he had been ship's-boy.

Scores of daring projects went Catherine-wheeling through his mind as he
steered seaward through the white enchanted world. In 1561 Spain was the
bogy of English seaports, most of whose folk were Protestants. There was
no knowing how long the coast-wise trade would be allowed to go on.

Out of the white mist flashed a whiter face, etched with black brows and
lashes and a pointed silky beard--the face of a man all in black, whose
body rose and dipped with the waves among the marsh grass of an eyot. So
lightly was it held that it might have slipped off in the wake of the
boat had not Tom Moone the carpenter caught it with a boat-hook. But
when they had the man on bo