"Well," said the lad, "and that was not all. Down he raged again to the decks and I behind him--I tell you, it was like a butcher's shop--but it was quieter now--the fighting was over--and the Spaniards were all run below, except half-a-dozen in the tops; looking down like young rooks at an archer. There had been a popish priest too with his crucifix in one hand and his god-almighty in the other, over a dying man as we came up; but as we came down there he lay in his black gown with a hole through his heart and his crucifix gone. One of the lads had got it no doubt. Well, the captain brought up at the main mast. 'God's blood,' he bawled, 'where are the brown devils got to?' Some one told him, and pointed down the hatch. Well, then I turned sick with my wound and the smell of the place and all; and I knew nothing more till I found myself sitting on a dead don, with the captain holding me up and pouring a cordial down my throat." Then talk and laughter broke out in the audience; but the landlord held up his hand for silence. "And what of the others?" he shouted. "Dead meat too," said the lad--"the captain went down with a dozen or more and hunted them out and finished them. There was one, Dick told me afterwards," and the lieutenant gave a cackle of mirth, "that they hunted twice round the ship before he jumped over yelling to some popish saint to help him; but it seems he was deaf, like the old Baal that parson tells of o' Sundays. The dirty swine to run like that! Well, he's got his bellyful now of the salt water that he came so far to see. And then the captain with his own hands trained a robinet that was on the poop on to the tops; and down the birds came, one by one; for their powder up there was all shot off." "And the _Seahorse_?" said the landlord again. There fell a dead silence: all in the room knew that the ship was lost, but it was terrible to hear it again. The lad's face broke into lines of grief, and he spoke huskily. "Gone down with the dead and wounded; and the rest of the fleet a mile away." Then the lieutenant went on to describe how he himself had been deputed to bring the _San Juan_ into port with the wounded on board, while the captain and the rest of the crew by Drake's orders attached themselves to various vessels that were short-handed, and how the English fleet had followed what was left of the Spaniards when the fight ended at sunset, up towards the North Sea. When he finished his story there was a tremendous outburst of cheering and hammering upon the table, and the feet and the pike-butts thundered on the floor, and a name was cried again and again as the cups were emptied. "God save her Grace and old England!" yelled a slim smooth-faced archer from Appledore. "God send the dons and all her foes to hell!" roared a burly pikeman with his cup in the air. Then the room shook again as the toasts were drunk with applauding feet and hands.