him by his new name, had been forced to serve nearly his full
time. He would have escaped earlier indeed, had he not been foolish
enough to join in a mutiny, which was discovered and suppressed. It was
in the course of this savage struggle for freedom that he lost his eye,
knocked out with a belaying pin by an officer whom he had just stabbed.
The innocent officer died and the rascal Ramiro died, but without his
good looks.

To a person of gentle birth, however great a scoundrel he might be, the
galleys, which represented penal servitude in the sixteenth century,
were a very rough school. Indeed for the most part the man who went into
them blameless became bad, and the man who went into them bad became
worse, for, as the proverb says, those who have dwelt in hell always
smell of brimstone. Who can imagine the awfulness of it--the chains,
the arduous and continual labour, the whip of the quarter-masters, the
company of thieves and outcast ruffians, all dreadful in its squalid
sameness?

Well, his strength and constitution, coupled with a sort of grim
philosophy, brought him through, and at length Ramiro found himself
a free man, middle-aged indeed, but intelligent and still strong, the
world once more before him. Yet what a world! His wife, believing him
dead, or perhaps wishing to believe it, had remarried and gone with her
husband to New Spain, taking his children with her, and his friends,
such of them as lived, turned their backs upon him. But although he had
been an unlucky man, for with him wickedness had not prospered, he still
had resource and courage.

The Count Montalvo was a penniless outlaw, a byword and a scorn, and so
the Count Montalvo--died, and was buried publicly in the church of his
native village. Strangely enough, however, about the same time the
Senor Ramiro appeared in another part of Spain, where with success he
practised as a notary and man of affairs. Some years went by thus, till
at length, having realised a considerable sum of money by the help of
an ingenious fraud, of which the details are superfluous, an inspiration
took him and he sailed for the Netherlands.

In those dreadful days, in order to further the ends of religious
persecution and of legalised theft, informers were rewarded with a
portion of the goods of heretics. Ramiro's idea--a great one in its
way--was to organise this informing business, and, by interesting a
number of confederates who practically were shareholders in the