Page:The art of story-telling, with nearly half a hundred stories, y Julia Darrow Cowles .. (IA artofstorytellin00cowl).pdf/230

 beginning. The sturdy Hollanders did not wait even for a summons to surrender. The foremost English ship had barely dropped her anchor in front of the Zwart Steen Battery, when there was a red flash from the old gray wall, a loud bang, and then a cannon-*ball came tearing through the foretopsail, and splashed into the water far beyond. Bang went the Englishman's whole broadside in return, and the balls were heard rattling among the rocks, or crashing into the front of the breastwork; and now the fight began in earnest.

Fire, smoke, flying shot, crashing timbers, deafening uproar, multiplied a thousandfold by the echoes of the surrounding hills—it was a hard fight, for there were Dutchmen behind those batteries who had swept the Channel with Van Tromp, and there were Englishmen aboard those ships who had fought him and his men, yardarm to yardarm, under Robert Blake; and it would have been hard to tell which were the braver or the more stubborn of the two.

"Fire away, boys, for the honor of Old England!" shouted Captain Richard Munden, pacing up and down the quarter