They boomed a broadside over his grave,
As meanin’ to say ‘Good Night’
“They sailed away in the dark
To the dear little isle they knew;
And they hung his drum by the old sea-wall
The same as he told them to.”
And now once again the drum has beaten and the spirit of Drake has returned to England. The materialists may laugh; the superstitious may speculate. But the sea folk on the red cliffs of Devonshire, they know.
It was some months after Pekin had been relieved by the Allied forces of twenty thousand men—the British, under Lieutenant-General Sir A. Gaselee, being the first to enter the Legations—that Mr. Whittall met Jellicoe on board the Centurion. The latter told him that he had played cricket for the flagship on the way down and had made 124—not out!