spotless championess of truth, and right, and freedoin,—Elizabeth your queen."
Amyas answered this rhapsody, which would have been then both fashionable and sincere, by a loyal chuckle. Eustace smiled meekly: but answered somewhat venomously nevertheless,
"I, at least, am certain that I spoke the truth, when I call my patroness a virgin undefiled."
Both the brothers' brows clouded at once. Amyas, as he lay on his back on the pebbles, said quietly to the gulls over his head,
"I wonder what the Frenchman, whose head I cut off at the Azores, thinks by now about all that."
"Cut off a Frenchman's head?" said Frank.
"Yes, faith; and so fleshed my maiden sword. I'll tell you. It was in some tavern; I and George Drake had gone in, and there sat this Frenchman, with his sword on the table, ready for a quarrel (I found afterwards he was a noted bully), and begins with us loudly enough about this and that; but, after awhile, by the instigation of the devil, what does he vent but a dozen slanders against her majesty's honor, one atop of the other. I was ashamed to hear them, and I should be more ashamed to repeat them."
"I have heard enough of such," said Frank. "They come mostly through lewd rascals about the French ambassador, who have been bred (God help them) among the filthy vices of that Medicean Court, in which the Queen of Scots had her schooling; and can only perceive in a virtuous freedom, a cloke for licentiousness like their own. Let the curs bark; Honi soit qui mal y pense is our motto, and shall be forever."
"But I didn't let the cur bark; for I took him by the ears, to show him out into the street. Whereon he got to his sword, and I to mine; and a very near chance I had of never bathing on the pebble-ridge more; for the fellow did not fight with edge and buckler, like a Christian, but had some newfangled French devil's device of scryming and foining with his point, ha'ing and stamping, and tracing at me, that I expected to be full of eyelet holes ere I could close with him."
"Thank God that you are safe, then!" said Frank. "I know that play well enough, and dangerous enough it is."
"Of course you know it; but I didn't, more's the pity."
"Well, I'll teach it thee, lad, as well as Rowland Yorke himself,
'Thy fincture, carricade, and sly passata,
Thy stramazon, and resolute stoccata,
Wiping maudritta, closing embrocata,
And all the cant of the honorable fencing mystery.'"
"Rowland Yorke? Who's he, then?"
"A very roystering rascal, who is making good profit in London just now by teaching this very art of fence; and is as likely to have his mortal thread dipt in a tavern brawl, as thy Frenchman. But how did you escape his pinking iron?"
