66. Friday, July 26th, was a tranquil summer day. The wind died away, and the two fleets, but a few miles apart, lay rocking on the waves. The Duke of Medina Sidonia took advantage of the pause and sent a swift messenger to the Prince of Parma, praying him to dispatch to his assistance forty small sailing-vessels, capable of contending with the light swift craft of the English. All the next day, July 27th, the two fleets sailed slowly up the Channel in hostile but silent companionship--the Spaniard convinced he could not meet the Englishman in open fight; the Englishman heedful that he should not be surrounded by a superior force. At night the battered and maltreated Armada took refuge in the harbor of Calais. 67. The same afternoon Lord Howard was joined by Sir Harry Seymour with his squadron of sixteen vessels, which bad been keeping watch along the eastern ports, and the combined fleet dropped anchor to the eastward of Calais, and within a mile and a half of the French shore. "Never, since England was England," says Mr. Motley, "had such a sight been seen as now revealed itself in those narrow straits between Dover and Calais. Along that low, sandy shore, and quite within the range of the Calais fortifications, one hundred and thirty Spanish ships--the greater number of them the largest and most heavily armed in the world--lay face to face, and scarcely out of cannon-shot, with one hundred and fifty English sloops and frigates, the strongest and swiftest that the island could furnish, and commanded by men whose exploits had rung through the world. 68. "Farther along the coast, invisible but known to be performing a most perilous and vital service, was a squadron of Dutch vessels of all sizes lining both the outer and inner of the sand-banks of the Flemish coasts and swarming in all the estuaries and inlets of that intricate and dangerous cruising-ground between Dunkirk and Texel. Those fleets of Holland and Zealand, numbering some one hundred and fifty galleons, sloops, and fly-boats, lay patiently blockading every possible egress from the ports in possession of the Duke of Parma, and longing to grapple with him as soon as his fleet of gunboats and hoys, packed with his Spanish and Italian veterans, should venture to set forth upon the sea for their long-meditated enterprise."