James Anthony Froude.
The "Pelican" met with many other adventures, and at last sailed for home. Sweeping in fine clear weather round the Cape of Good Hope, she touched once for water at Sierra Leone, and finally sailed in triumph into Plymouth Harbor.
English sympathy with an extraordinary exploit is always irresistible. Shouts of applause rang through the country; and Elizabeth, every bit of her an English-woman, felt with her subjects. She sent for Drake to London, made him tell his story over and over again, and was never weary of listening to him.
—From "English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century,"
by James Anthony Froude.
A BRAVE RESCUE AND A ROUGH RIDE.
It happened upon a November evening (when I was about fifteen years old, and outgrowing my strength very rapidly, my sister Annie being turned thirteen, and a deal of rain having fallen, and all the troughs in the yard being flooded, and the bark from the wood ricks washed down the gutter, and even our watershoot growing brown) that the ducks in the barnyard made a terrible quacking, instead of marching off to their pen, one behind another. Thereupon Annie and I ran out to see what might be the sense of it. There were thirteen ducks, and ten lily-white (as the fashion of ducks then was), not, I mean, twenty-three in all, but ten white and three brown-striped ones; and without being nice about their color, they all quacked very movingly. They pushed their gold-colored bills here and there (yet dirty, as gold is apt to be), and they jumped on the triangles of their feet, and sounded out of their nostrils; and some of the overexcited ones ran along low on the ground, quacking grievously, with their bills snapping and bending, and the roof of their mouths exhibited.
Annie began to cry "dilly, dilly, einy, einy, ducksey," according to the burden of a tune they seem to have accepted as the national ducks' anthem; but instead of being soothed by it, they only quacked three times as hard, and ran round till we were giddy. And then they shook their tails all together, and looked grave, and went round and round again.