Running on and on till delayed
By the mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred tons,
And towering high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,
Took the breath from our sails, and we stayed.
The soft, lingering voice threw the words at us with a thrill and a leap forward, just us the Revenge was carrying us with long bounds, over the shining sea. We were spinning easily now, under a steady light wind, and Cary, his hand on the rudder, was opposite me. He turned with a start as the girl began Tennyson's lines, and his shining dark eyes stared up at her.
"Do you know that?" he said, forgetting the civil "Miss" in his earnestness.
"Do I know it? Indeed I do!" cried Sally from her swinging rostrum. "Do you know it, too? I love it—I love every word of it—listen," And I, who knew her good memory, and the spell that the music of a noble poem cast over her, settled myself with resignation. I was quite sure that, short of throwing her overboard, she would recite that poem from beginning to end. And she did. Her skirts and her hair blowing, her eyes full of the glory of that old "forlorn hope," gazing out past us to the seas that had borne the hero, she said it.
At Flores in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a frightened bird, came flying from far away;
Spanish ships of war at sea, we have sighted fifty-three!