it prevailed there was no chance of escaping out of it. It was at Santa Cruz that Nelson suffered his one defeat and lost his arm. It is not the least of Blake's titles to fame that he succeeded where Nelson failed.

On the morning of April 20, Blake, with his squadron, appeared off the bay. A fleet of sixteen great galleons was drawn across the bottom of the bay, and Blake's swift soldierly glance told him in a moment that these ships would act as a screen betwixt his own squadron and the great Spanish batteries on the shore. Blake led into the attack with the same lightning-like decision Nelson showed at the Nile. The British fleet ran, with all sail spread, but in grim silence, past the batteries at the entrance to the bay. The fire was loud and fierce, but the Spanish markmanship bad. His leading ships, under his favourite officer, Stayner, Blake launched at the galleons, but with the remainder of the squadron Blake himself rounded on the flank of the batteries, covering Stayner from their fire. For four hours the 700 guns of ships and batteries sent their tremendous waves of sound up the slopes of Teneriffe. The Spaniards fought with great courage, but Blake's fire, by its speed and deadliness, was overwhelming. At two o'clock the fleet of galleons was in flames; by three o'clock nothing was left of them but half-a-dozen drifting blackened wrecks. Then came a sudden change of wind, and Blake's ships ran safely past the forts again to the open sea. They had done their work. They had not merely "singed the King of Spain's beard"; they had emptied his pockets and broken his strength. "The whole action," says Claren

don, "was so miraculous that all men who knew the place concluded that no sober man, with what courage soever endued, would ever undertake it." Yet Blake did this "miraculous" thing, and the daring that inspired the exploit is not so wonderful as the genius which kept this scurvy-wasted, barnacle-covered fleet in the heroic temper which made it eager to accomplish whatever Blake planned.

Nothing is more pathetic than the story of Blake's home-coming. On an August afternoon in 1657 the fleet-the battered flagship, the George, leading—was in sight of Plymouth. The green hills of Devonshire, the spires and roofs of the smoky city, the masts of the ships were in full view. The piers and shores were crowded with thousands waiting to welcome the greatest sailor of his generation back to England. All the church bells in Plymouth were ringing. But at that moment Blake lay dying in his cabin. His captains, with those rare and reluctant tears that brave men weep running down their weather-beaten faces, were standing round his bed bidding farewell to their great chief. Just as the slow-moving George dropped her anchor Blake breathed his last. Never has England had a braver, a less selfish, a more simply and nobly loyal servant. His corpse was rowed by his sailors up the Thames, carried in state to Westminster Abbey, and laid in Henry VII.'s chapel—the noblest bit of human dust in even that mausoleum of kings. It is one of the things to be remembered against Charles II. that, after the Restoration, he had Blake's bones dragged from their resting-place and cast into some nameless grave. The English monarch, however, who sold Dunkirk and

filled his pockets with French gold could hardly be expected to respect, or even to understand, Blake's fame. Perhaps, indeed, the fame of the noblest and bravest of English sailors was a secret sting to the conscience of the worst of English kings.

MONG the historical treasures of Blenheim House

A is a slip of paper on which are scribbled a dozen

lines in pencil. Those lines were written by the Duke of Marlborough at the close of the fierce death-wrestle at Blenheim. The tumult of battle was rolling westward, where French and Bavarians were in disordered retreat, with Marlborough's cavalry riding fiercely on their rear. The smoke of the great fight yet hung black in the heavens. The slopes of the hills to the right, where Prince Eugene had four times over made his fiery onset, and the marshy plain in the centre where Marlborough himself, by a cavalry charge worthy of Murat-8000 cavalry joined in one furious onset of galloping hoofs-had broken through the French centre, were strewn with nearly 30,000 killed and wounded. But Marlborough, with the rapture of the great fight still dancing in his blood, pulled up his horse on one of the little rustic bridges across the Schwanbuch, and