“How, sir?”

“To conquer our own fancies, Amyas, and our own lusts, and our ambition, in the sacred name of duty; this it is to be truly brave, and truly strong; for he who cannot rule himself, how can he rule his crew or his fortunes?  Come, now, I will make you a promise.  If you will bide quietly at home, and learn from your father and mother all which befits a gentleman and a Christian, as well as a seaman, the day shall come when you shall sail with Richard Grenville himself, or with better men than he, on a nobler errand than gold-hunting on the Spanish Main.”

“O my boy, my boy!” said Mrs. Leigh, “hear what the good Sir Richard promises you.  Many an earl’s son would be glad to be in your place.”

“And many an earl’s son will be glad to be in his place a score years hence, if he will but learn what I know you two can teach him.  And now, Amyas, my lad, I will tell you for a warning the history of that Sir Thomas Stukely of whom I spoke just now, and who was, as all men know, a gallant and courtly knight, of an ancient and worshipful family in Ilfracombe, well practised in the wars, and well beloved at first by our incomparable queen, the friend of all true virtue, as I trust she will be of yours some day; who wanted but one step to greatness, and that was this, that in his hurry to rule all the world, he forgot to rule himself.  At first, he wasted his estate in show and luxury, always intending to be famous, and destroying his own fame all the while by his vainglory and haste.  Then, to retrieve his losses, he hit upon the peopling of Florida, which thou and I will see done some day, by God’s blessing; for I and some good friends of mine have an errand there as well as he.  But he did not go about it as a loyal man, to advance the honor of his queen, but his own honor only, dreaming that he too should be a king; and was not ashamed to tell her majesty that he had rather be sovereign of a molehill than the highest subject of an emperor.”

“They say,” said Mr. Leigh, “that he told her plainly he should be a prince before he died, and that she gave him one of her pretty quips in return.”

“I don’t know that her majesty had the best of it.  A fool is many times too strong for a wise man, by virtue of his thick hide.  For when she said that she hoped she should hear from him in his new principality, ‘Yes, sooth,’ says he, graciously enough.  ‘And in what style?’ asks she.  ‘To our dear sister,’ says Stukely:  to which her clemency had nothing to reply, but turned away, as Mr. Burleigh told me, laughing.”

“Alas for him!” said gentle Mrs. Leigh.  “Such self-conceit—­and Heaven knows we have the root of it in ourselves also—­is the very daughter of self-will, and of that loud crying out about I, and me, and mine, which is the very bird-call for all devils, and the broad road which leads to death.”