Nicholas Beauvallet, a younger son, spent the restlessness of his youth in wanderings upon the Continent, as befitted his station. He left his England a boy overflowing with such a spirit of dare-devilry that his father and his elder brother prophesied it would lead him to disaster. He came back to it a man seasoned and tried, but it was not to be seen that the dare-devilry had departed from him. His brother, succeeding to their father's room, shook a grave head, and called him Italianate, a ruffler, a veritable swashbuckler, and wondered that he would not be still. Nicholas refused to fulfil his family's expectations. He must be off on his adventures again. He went to sea; he made some little noise about the New World, and in due course accompanied Drake on his voyage round the world. With that master mariner he passed the Straits of Magellan, saw the sack of Valparaiso, reached the far Pelew Islands, and Mindanao, and came home round the perilous Cape of Storms, bronzed of face, and hard of muscle, and rich beyond the dreams of man. This was well enough, no doubt, but Gerard Beauvallet, a sober man, judged it time to be done with such traffickings. Nicholas had won an honourable knighthood; let him settle down now, choose a suitable bride, and provide the heirs that came not to my Lady Beauvallet. Instead of this, incorrigible Nicholas had sailed away, after the briefest of intervals, this time in a ship of his own. So far from conducting himself like a respectable landowner, such as his brother wished him to be, he seemed to be concerned only to make a strong noise about the world. This he did with complete success. There was only one Drake, but also there was only one Beauvallet. The Spaniards coupled the two names together, but made of Beauvallet a kind of devil. Drake performed the impossible in the only possible way; the Spaniards said that El Beauvallet performed it in an impossible way, and feared him accordingly. As for his own men, they held him in some affection, and believed firmly in his luck and in his genius. They thought him clearly mad, but his madness was profitable, and they had long ceased to wonder at anything he might take it into his head to do. They might be trusted to follow where he led, knowing by experience that he would not lead them to disaster. His master, Patrick Howe, of bearded mien, would wag a solemn finger. "Look you, we win because our Nick cannot fail. He is bird-eyed for opportunity, and blind to danger, and he laughs his way out of every peril we come to. Mad? Ay, you may say so." The truth was that Sir Nicholas would swoop lightning-swift into some hare-brained emprise and be off again victorious while you stood a-gape at his hardihood. Thus with his sweeping off of Doña Dominica, before she had time to fetch her breath. And all with no more than a careless snap of the fingers, as it were. Oh, a hardy fellow, God wot!