[Illustration: EARLY PORTRAITS OF SIR JOHN JELLICOE AS MIDSHIPMAN AS LIEUTENANT] When the author was in Devonshire a little while after the outbreak of the world-war he was talking to an old sailor who had seen service, now retired at the age of nearly eighty years. He stood on the red cliffs beyond Brixham close to the doors of his cottage straining his eyes, still clear and bright, seaward, watching for the ships he loved. The author referred to this story and the sailor's face grew grave and he was silent for a long time. "The drum was beat," he whispered at last. "Drake's drum was heered to beat a while back; our lads heered 'er, one night when they was puttin' out from Plymouth Sound." He nodded his head to and fro as he took off his cap: "But I knawed long back when I stood afore Jacky Jellicoe, close as I be standin' to yew; I caught his eye--and I knawed it was Drake come back.... Yes, sir; the old drum beat and he come back as he said he would----" "If England needs me, dead Or living, I'll rise that day! I'll rise from the darkness under the sea Ten thousand miles away." That's what he said; and he died. "They lowered him down in the deep, And there in the sunset light They boomed a broadside over his grave, As meanin' to say 'Good Night' "They sailed away in the dark To the dear little isle they knew; And they hung his drum by the old sea-wall The same as he told them to." And now once again the drum has beaten and the spirit of Drake has returned to England. The materialists may laugh; the superstitious may speculate. But the sea folk on the red cliffs of Devonshire, _they know_. * * * * * It was some months after Pekin had been relieved by the Allied forces of twenty thousand men--the British, under Lieutenant-General Sir A. Gaselee, being the first to enter the Legations--that Mr. Whittall met Jellicoe on board the _Centurion_. The latter told him that he had played cricket for the flagship on the way down and had made 124--not out! His lung had healed and his left arm was as strong as his right. A cheeky midshipman on hearing of Captain Jellicoe's third and most marvellous escape from death said that obviously he was born to be hanged--or to be Commander-in-Chief of the whole British Navy. On his return to England Jellicoe received the C.B. for his services, and the German Emperor decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle of the Second Class with crossed swords. Jellicoe learnt something about the fighting qualities of the German sailor during the attempt to relieve Pekin: later on he became a personal friend of the Emperor's, and his portrait appears in the great picture which the Kaiser ordered to be painted of the Allied Naval Brigades in action in China and which now hangs on the walls of the Imperial Palace at Potsdam.