mander Baron Trenck[D] when
his Pandours--of whom I was one--broke into Mutiny. He drew a pistol
from his belt, and said, "I shall decimate you." And he began to count
Ten, "one, two, three, four," and so on, till he came to the tenth man,
whom he shot Dead. And then he took to counting again, until he was
arrived at the second Tenth. That man's brains he also blew out. I was
the tenth of the third batch, but I never blenched. Trenck happily held
his hand before he came to Me. The Pandours cried out that they would
submit, although I never spoke a word; he forgave us; and I had a flask
of Tokay with him in his tent that very after-dinner. I have seen a man
keel-hauled at sea, and brought up on the other side, his face all
larded with barnacles like a Shrove-tide capon. Thrice I have stood
beneath the yardarm with the rope round my neck (owing to a king's ship
mistaking the character of my vessel).[E] I have seen men scourged till
the muscles of their backs were laid bare as in a Theatre of Anatomy; I
have watched women's limbs crackle and frizzle in the flames at an Act
of Faith, with the King and Court--ay, and the court-ladies too--looking
on. I stood by when that poor mad wretch Damiens was pulled to pieces by
horses in the Greve. I have seen what the plague could do in the galleys
at Marseilles. Death and I have been boon companions and bedfellows. He
has danced a jig with me on a plank, and ridden bodkin, and gone snacks
with me for a lump of horse-flesh in a beleaguered town; but no man can
say that John Dangerous had aught but a bold face to show that Phantom
who frights nursemaids and rich idle people so.

And yet, now, I can recall the cold shudder that passed through my young
veins when my Grandmother died. Of all days, too, that the Thirtieth of
January should have been ordered for her passing away! It was
mid-winter, and the streets were white with Innocent Snow when she was
taken ill. She had not been one of those trifling and trivanting
gentlewomen that pull diseases on to their pates with drums and routs,
and late hours, and hot rooms, and carding, and distilled waters. She
had ever been of a most sober conversation and temperate habit; so that
the prodigious age she reached became less of a wonder, and the
tranquillity with which her spirit left this darksome house of clay
seemed mercifully natural. They had noticed, so early as the autumn of
'19, that she was decaying; yet had the roots of life stricken