So--ships and music and cheering crowds and dancing water and blue sky and green hills--Brion had seen the picture, and gone down into it and become part of it, until the world was suddenly moving before his eyes, and he had discovered that it was not it that was leaving him but he it. It sounds simple, but it was a wonderful discovery: so also was that which shortly presented himself to himself as something immeasurably small and insignificant, the result of a first experience on the open sea. On land he had had his own little place, which he could always shift at will: here his will was the will of the mutable waters which bore him helpless on their surface. The feeling had a little shocked him in its first realisation; but he had quickly come to appreciate it at its better worth. He had nothing any longer to fret or worry him, because it was quite useless to fret or feel anxiety about anything. As an individual responsible to himself for his actions he had ceased to count; the whole business of himself had been taken over by Destiny. All sense of care seemed to slip away wonderfully under that conviction, he felt in a manner the joy of one suddenly disembodied. They weighed and sailed on that bright morning of the 9th April, seven of them in all, to wit the _Tiger_ of 140 tons, which was the Admiral’s ship, the _Roebuck_, a fly-boat of like burden, but built for speed and narrow waters, the _Lion_ of 100 tons, the _Elizabeth_ of 50, and a barque, the _Dorothy_, with a couple of small pinnaces for light work. Strictly, it was Sir Walter’s most personal adventure, he chiefly financing it and supplying the majority of the craft; but for reasons already given he did not accompany his own enterprise, though he was there to cheer it on its way. He had come down into that part of the county to attend the wedding of the Mayor of Plymouth--no less a man than the great Francis Drake himself, who had just seized an interval in his abounding duties to marry, for his second wife, the young Mistress Sydenham, heiress to a knightly Somersetshire family--and had taken advantage of his proximity to Plymouth to kill two birds with one stone. He had a great confidence in his brother-in-law, Sir Richard Grenville, to whom he had deputed the command of the expedition, and bade Brion observe him for his excellences as a navigator and a leader of men combined, which made him the ideal character for such an undertaking. All which Brion was quite ready to believe, without unduly criticizing the qualities which made a man what he was; and, indeed, if Sir Richard’s tongue was rough to brutality, he kept the smooth side of it in a quite wonderful way for the young man, for whom he seemed to entertain a curious liking, the first of which he showed by nominating both him and Clerivault to a berth on his own flag-ship, which was a roomy vessel for those days, and well appointed, though lacking in much of the luxury which was an