Then there was indeed joy.  “The Revenge!  The Revenge!  I am sailing on the Revenge, with a man who knows Sir Richard Grenville and Amyas Leigh!  Cousin Mary, listen to that—­this is the Revenge we’re on—­this!” She hugged the mast, “And there are Spanish galleons, great three-deckers, with yawning tiers of guns, all around us!  You may not see them, but they are here!  They are ghosts, but they are here!  There is the great San Philip, hanging over us like a cloud, and we are—­we are—­Oh, I don’t know who we are, but we’re in the fight, the most beautiful fight in history!” She began to quote: 

    And half of their fleet to the right, and half to the left were seen,
    And the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane between.

And then: 

    Thousands of their sailors looked down from the decks and laughed;
    Thousands of their soldiers made mock at the mad little craft
    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! 
    Then up spake Sir Thomas Howard
    “’Fore God, I am no coward”—­

She went on and on with the brave, beautiful story.  How Sir Thomas would not throw away his six ships of the line in a hopeless fight against fifty-three; how yet Sir Richard, in the Revenge, would not leave behind his “ninety men and more, who were lying sick ashore”; how at last Sir Thomas

          sailed away
    With five ships of war that day
    Till they melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven,
    But Sir Richard bore in hand
    All his sick men from the