forty years was no longer a protection to him. Having
known the true Christ in the Gospel, he could not turn back to Mohammed,
even though Christians persecuted in the Name they so little understood.

The crisis came in 1507, when Ximenes, apparently impelled by the dread
that simulated conformity should corrupt the Church, quickened the
persecution of the doubtful "Nuevos Cristianos," and the Abenali family,
who had made themselves loved and respected, received warning that they
had been denounced, and that their only hope lay in flight.

The two sons, high-spirited young men, on whom religion had far less
hold than national feeling, fled to the Alpuxarra Mountains, and
renouncing the faith of the persecutors, joined their countrymen in
their gallant and desperate warfare. Their mother, who had long been
dead, had never been more than an outward Christian; but the second wife
of Abenali shared his belief and devotion with the intelligence and
force of character sometimes found among the Moorish ladies of Spain.
She and her little ones fled with him in disguise to Cadiz, with the
precious Arabic Scriptures rolled round their waists, and took shelter
with an English merchant, who had had dealings in sword-blades with
Senor Miguel, and had been entertained by him in his beautiful Saracenic
house at Ronda with Eastern hospitality. This he requited by giving
them the opportunity of sailing for England in a vessel laden with Xeres
sack; but the misery of the voyage across the Bay of Biscay in a ship
lit for nothing but wine, was excessive, and creatures reared in the
lovely climate and refined luxury of the land of the palm and orange,
exhausted too already by the toils of the mountain journey, were
incapable of enduring it, and Abenali's brave wife and one of her
children were left beneath the waves of the Atlantic. With the one
little girl left to him, he arrived in London, and the recommendation of
his Cadiz friend obtained for him work from a dealer in foreign weapons,
who was not unwilling to procure them nearer home. Happily for him,
Moorish masters, however rich, were always required to be proficients in
their own trade; and thus Miguel, or Michael as he was known in England,
was able to maintain himself and his child by the fabrication of blades
that no one could distinguish from those of Damascus. Their perfection
was a work of infinite skill, labour, and industry, but they were so
costly, that their price, a