As for Captain Q, he dwelt for many a year in the house we bought for him at Bitterne, across the river. I saw him often; his wits were quite gone, poor gentleman! and he remembered nothing of the strange happenings that brought us together. ’Tis forty years and more since I made a journey to the little village of Quimperlé in Brittany, in hope that I might discover somewhat of the family of one who must have been a notable figure there in his youth. ’Twas a bootless quest. Some of the more ancient inhabitants remembered a young Huguenot named Marcel de Monteray who had fought in the wars of religion, and had been, ’twas said, a captain in the army of Condé; but he had never returned to his native place, and all his kinsfolk were long since dead. Whether Marcel de Monteray and Captain Q were the same person I do not know, and never shall. When I spoke the name in the Captain’s hearing it brought nothing to his remembrance. To all Southampton, as to me, he was ever a mysterious personage. As Captain Q he lived, and when his time came to die (and he was then of a very great age), as Captain Q he was buried. [Illustration: tailpiece to First Part] *Interim* My grandfather told me that upon his return, after near a year’s absence, his parents’ joy was such that they forbore to upbraid and scold him; indeed, they killed for him the fatted calf, as it were, and made much of him. His father was for putting him again to school, but he protested that he had had enough of schooling, and desired nothing more than to follow a man’s vocation. Thereto his father consented, provided he first kept a term or two at one of the Inns of Court, and learnt so much of law as would suffice for a justice of the peace when he should have come to man’s estate. It was in the summer after his return that the great fleet upon which the King of Spain had spent so much pains and treasure came at last to invade our shores; and my grandfather, being then at home, hied him to Southampton, to learn the course of its progress. He watched enviously the English vessels sail out from the haven, even the smacks and shallops being filled with young lads and gentlemen of the county eager to bear their part in the fray, or at the least to witness the unequal combat between the cumbersome great vessels of the Spaniards and the light, nimble ships that my Lord Howard commanded, with his lieutenants Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher and the rest. To serve with those great seamen was not permitted him, but he accompanied Sir George Carey when he ran out in a pinnace on the night of July 24, and found himself, as he wrote, "in the midst of round shot, flying as thick as musket-balls in a skirmish on land." But for the strict command of his father, doubtless he would have followed the Armada up the Channel, and beheld how it was stung and chevied, and finally discomfited in the Calais roads.