eached only for a few months in St Andrews in 1547, when the
castle capitulated to the foreign fleet, and he and his companions were
flung into the French galleys. There for nineteen months he toiled at
the oar under the lash, and through the cold of two winters, and the
heat of the intervening summer, had leisure to count the cost of the
choice so recently made. It is a tribute to his constancy that men
chiefly remember this dark time by its spots of colour--as when, at
Nantes, he flung Our Lady's image into the Loire--'She is light enough:
let her learn to swim!' And when off St Andrews they pointed out to him
the steeple of the kirk, the emaciated prisoner replied, 'Yes, I know it
well: and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever I now appear, that I
shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify His godly
name in the same place.' But this first apprenticeship to sorrow went
deep into the man. It was when he was 'in Rouen, lying in irons, and
sore troubled by corporal infirmity, in a galley named _Notre Dame_,'
that he sent a letter to his St Andrews friends. And in it he asks them
to 'Consider'--his countrymen have scarcely as yet considered it
sufficiently--'Consider, brethren, it is no speculative theologue which
desireth to give you courage, but even your brother in affliction, which
partly hath experience what Satan's wrath may do against the chosen of
God.'[60] His spirit indeed was in no wise broken: on his escape from
France he became again a garrison preacher, and gained over King
Edward's rude soldiers in Berwick an ascendancy, even greater than he
had held in St Andrews over the young lairds of Fife. But, though not
broken, it was chastened. It was during the following years, and
especially in 1553, that he wrote the deeply sympathetic letters from
which we have already quoted. And in 1554, when he left England to
escape Mary Tudor, he introduces into a short but admirable treatise on
Prayer some autobiographical references, which seem to date back to the
extreme suffering of his captivity, 'when not only the ungodly, but even
my faithful brethren, yea, and my own self, that is, all natural
understanding, judged my cause (case) to be irremediable.'

'The frail flesh, oppressed with fear and pain, desireth
deliverance, ever abhorring and drawing back from obedience
giving. O Christian brethren, I write by experience ... I know
the grudging and murmuring complaints of the flesh;