SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT.
ITO TUE EDITOR OP TEE " SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—The interesting correspondence on squirrels to which you have lately opened your columns puts one in mind that Sir Humphrey Gilbert named the little pinnace in which he was wrecked and lost, The Squirrel,'—quite in- appropriately, it would seem, unless there existed in his mind some connexion between the little nut-cracker and the art of navigation. It was in that small craft of only forty tons that he braved the Atlantic on his last homeward voyage from Newfoundland, steadily resisting the entreaties of his friends, who, when a gale arose, hailed him from the great ship sailing alongside and besought him to come on board. But Sir Humphrey cave to 'The Squirrel,' and as the waves boomed and hissed around him he lifted his voice above the storm : "We are as near heaven by sea as by land !" and, on a sudden, was swept from her bows. Sir Humphrey, like his half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, had been reared amid the pleasant woods and streams of Devon. As the boys wandered together along the countryside he may -well have learned to share Sir Walter's ardent love of Nature and keen insight into her ways ; he too may have become -" one of Nature's Privy Councillors." And is it not possible that he desired to carry with him across the Atlantic the cherished remembrance of some fairylike voyage of discovery on which he had gazed with wide eyes and bated breath in the far-off Wonderland of his childhood ?—I am, Sir,
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