of
villainous piracy? Had he not scuttled a Spanish carack four years ago
in the bay of Funchal? Had he not been with that pirate Hawkins in the
affair at San Juan de Ulloa? And so on. Questions poured upon him and
engulfed him.

He almost regretted that he had given himself the trouble to accept
conversion and all that it entailed at the hands of the Brethren of
St. Dominic. It began to appear to him that he had but wasted time and
escaped the clerical fire to be dangled on a secular rope as an offering
to the vengeful gods of outraged Spain.

So much, however, was not done. The galleys in the Mediterranean were
in urgent need of men at the time, and to this circumstance Sir Oliver,
Captain Leigh, and some others of the luckless crew of the Swallow owed
their lives, though it is to be doubted whether any of them found the
matter one for congratulation. Chained each man to a fellow, ankle to
ankle, with but a short length of links between, they formed part of a
considerable herd of unfortunates, who were driven across Portugal
into Spain and then southward to Cadiz. The last that Sir Oliver saw of
Captain Leigh was on the morning on which he set out from the reeking
Lisbon gaol. Thereafter throughout that weary march each knew the other
to be somewhere in that wretched regiment of galley-slaves; but they
never came face to face again.

In Cadiz Sir Oliver spent a month in a vast enclosed space that was open
to the sky, but nevertheless of an indescribable foulness, a place of
filth, disease, and suffering beyond human conception, the details of
which the curious may seek for himself in my Lord Henry's chronicles.
They are too revolting by far to be retailed here.

At the end of that month he was one of those picked out by an officer
who was manning a galley that was to convey the Infanta to Naples. He
owed this to his vigorous constitution which had successfully withstood
the infections of that mephitic place of torments, and to the fine thews
which the officer pummelled and felt as though he were acquiring a beast
of burden--which, indeed, is precisely what he was doing.

The galley to which our gentleman was dispatched was a vessel of
fifty oars, each manned by seven men. They were seated upon a sort of
staircase that followed the slope of the oar, running from the gangway
in the vessel's middle down to the shallow bulwarks.

The place allotted to Sir Oliver was that next the gangway. Here, stark
naked as when