the Moor who carried the letter was stopped just
outside Oran, and the letter being found upon him, he was sent back to
Algiers, where by the order of the Dey he was promptly impaled as a
warning to others, while Cervantes was condemned to receive two thousand
blows of the stick, a number which most likely would have deprived the
world of "Don Quixote," had not some persons, who they were we know not,
interceded on his behalf.

After this he seems to have been kept in still closer confinement than
before, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt. This
time his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade and two
Valencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he and
about sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but just
as they were about to put it into execution one Doctor Juan Blanco de
Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot.
Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiring
energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery,
had endeared himself to all, and become the leading spirit in the captive
colony, and, incredible as it may seem, jealousy of his influence and the
esteem in which he was held, moved this man to compass his destruction by
a cruel death. The merchants finding that the Dey knew all, and fearing
that Cervantes under torture might make disclosures that would imperil
their own lives, tried to persuade him to slip away on board a vessel
that was on the point of sailing for Spain; but he told them they had
nothing to fear, for no tortures would make him compromise anybody, and
he went at once and gave himself up to the Dey.

As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices. Everything
was made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was put round his
neck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be got from him
was that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who had since left
Algiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who were to accompany
him were not to know anything of it until the last moment. Finding he
could make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to prison more heavily
ironed than before.

The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying once
more to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred ducats
was got together and entrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan Gil, who
was about to