periphrasis? De Ruyter came, with ninety-one ships of war and forty-four fireships, sailing "in quest of the English," and Sandwich, after giving the warning in vain, saved the day by a display of gallantry to be ranked as extraordinary even in the annals of the English navy. Sailing out to meet the Dutchman, he engaged him at once and gave time to the Duke and the French admiral. "He killed Van Ghent, a Dutch admiral, and beat off his ship; he sunk another ship, which ventured to lay him aboard; he sunk three fireships, which endeavoured to grapple with him; and, though his vessel was torn to pieces with shot, and of a thousand men she contained near six hundred were laid dead upon the deck, he continued still to thunder with all his artillery in the midst of the enemy. But another fireship, more fortunate than the preceding, having laid hold of his vessel, her destruction was now inevitable. Warned by Sir Edward Haddock, his captain, he refused to make his escape, and bravely embraced death as a shelter from that ignominy which a rash expression of the Duke's, he thought, had thrown upon him." Admiral and flag-captain, in fact, perished when the fire reached the magazine, and this time at any rate the "price of Admiralty" was paid in full. [Illustration: SOUTHWOLD HARBOUR] The English claimed a victory and embalmed it in a ballad, although the truth was that the Duke's fleet was too much shattered for pursuit and the French fleet, under secret orders, perhaps, from Louis XIV, did next to nothing; the Dutch, probably, claimed one also, although the battle ended the hopes with which De Ruyter's expedition started. All that matters nothing now. The moment that heartens a man is that at which he stands on this low-lying shore, as spectators stood all the long day in May, 1672, and remembers the gallant fight and the glorious death of Sandwich. "Sir Isaac Newton is also said to have heard it [the firing] at Cambridge." So writes the accomplished author of Murray's Guide in 1875, and there is nothing incredible in the suggestion. The distance is but seventy miles, roughly; the cannon of old time with their black powder made a terrible sound; acoustics are full of mystery, and the noise of the big guns at Portsmouth is often heard in the heart of the Berkshire Downs. From Euston to the centre of Sole Bay is about half the distance over which sound is said to have reached Newton, and it is on record that Lord Ossory, then a guest of the Duke of Grafton, heard the guns and rode half-way across East Anglia to witness the battle. Surely it was a majestic and awe-inspiring spectacle for those on the shore, and surely it is worth while to reconstruct it now in imagination.