“What are we to do now, Amyas, in the devil’s name?” asked Cary, peevishly.

“What are we to do, in God’s name, rather,” answered Amyas in a low voice.  “Will, Will, what did God make you a gentleman for, but to know better than those poor fickle fellows forward, who blow hot and cold at every change of weather!”

“I wish you’d come forward and speak to them, sir,” said Yeo, who had overheard the last words, “or we shall get nought done.”

Amyas went forward instantly.

“Now then, my brave lads, what’s the matter here, that you are all sitting on your tails like monkeys?”

“Ugh!” grunts one.  “Don’t you think our day’s work has been long enough yet, captain?”

“You don’t want us to go in to La Guayra again, sir?  There are enough of us thrown away already, I reckon, about that wench there.”

“Best sit here, and sink quietly.  There’s no getting home again, that’s plain.”

“Why were we brought out here to be killed.”

“For shame, men!” cries Yeo, “murmuring the very minute after the Lord has delivered you from the Egyptians.”

Now I do not wish to set Amyas up as better, thank God, than many and many a brave and virtuous captain in her Majesty’s service at this very day:  but certainly he behaved admirably under that trial.  Drake had trained him, as he trained many another excellent officer, to be as stout in discipline and as dogged of purpose, as he himself was:  but he had trained him also to feel with and for his men, to make allowances for them, and to keep his temper with them, as he did this day.  Amyas’s conscience smote him (and his simple and pious soul took the loss of his brother as God’s verdict on his conduct), because he had set his own private affection, even his own private revenge, before the safety of his ship’s company and the good of his country.

“Ah,” said he to himself, as he listened to his men’s reproaches, “if I had been thinking, like a loyal soldier, of serving my queen, and crippling the Spaniard, I should have taken that great bark three days ago, and in it the very man I sought!”

So “choking down his old man,” as Yeo used to say, he made answer cheerfully—­

“Pooh! pooh! brave lads!  For shame, for shame!  You were lions half-an-hour ago; you are not surely turned sheep already!  Why, but yesterday evening you were grumbling because I would not run in and fight those three ships under the batteries of La Guayra, and now you think it too much to have fought them fairly out at sea?  Nothing venture, nothing win; and nobody goes birdnesting without a fall at times.  If any one wants to be safe in this life, he’d best stay at home and keep his bed; though even there who knows but the roof might fall through on him?”

“Ah, it’s all very well for you, captain,” said some grumbling younker, with a vague notion that Amyas must be better off than he because he was a gentleman.  Amyas’s blood rose.