But it is only to startle us again out of all sobriety when next the veil is lifted, so like a fairy tale the truth appears. In Chatham reach, off the new dockyard, was the anchorage where the navy ships were laid up when out of commission, and there too lay veteran war hulks slowly rotting to death. S0 well had Edmund Drake's friends stood by him that one of these had been assigned to him as a dwelling-place, and with it an official appointment as Reader of prayers to the Royal Navy. To such a nursery had Catholic devotion driven the most redoubtable of its enemies. What wonder that it bred a crusading sea-king| The clatter of the ship wrights' hammers in the dockyard, the sea-songs of the mariners as they polished the idle guns, the fierce and intemperate denunciations of his father's friends vowing vengeance on the idolaters who had defiled the House of God, — such were the first sounds his dawning intelli gence learnt to grasp. His eyes could rest nowhere but on masts, and guns, and the towering hulks of the warships which lay anchored about his ?oating home. His very play things were instruments of destruction; the prayer he lisped at his mother's knee was little better than a curse.