I seated myself on one of the thwarts well forward in the boat. By my side was a heavy iron boat-hook. I had noticed that all the occupants of the boat, except the fisherman who sailed her, wore armor; and when I saw the boat-hook, a diabolical thought entered my mind and I immediately acted upon its suggestion. Noiselessly I grasped the hook, and with its point pried loose a board in the bottom of the boat, first having removed my boots, cloak, and doublet. When the board was loosened I pressed my heel against it with all the force I could muster, and through an opening six inches broad and four feet long came a flood of water that swamped the boat before one could utter twenty words. I heard a cry from one of the men: "The dog has scuttled the boat. Shoot him!" At the same instant the blaze and noise of two fusils broke the still blackness of the night, but I was overboard and the powder and lead were wasted. The next moment the boat sank in ten fathoms of water, and with it went the men in armor. I hope the fisherman saved himself. I have often wondered if even the law of self-preservation justified my act. It is an awful thing to inflict death, but it is worse to endure it, and I feel sure that I am foolish to allow my conscience to trouble me for the sake of those who would have led me back to the scaffold. I fear you will think that six dead men in less than as many pages make a record of bloodshed giving promise of terrible things to come, but I am glad I can reassure you on that point. Although there may be some good fighting ahead of us, I believe the last man has been killed of whom I shall chronicle--the last, that is, in fight or battle. In truth, the history which you are about to read is not my own. It is the story of a beautiful, wilful girl, who was madly in love with the one man in all the world whom she should have avoided--as girls are wont to be. This perverse tendency, philosophers tell us, is owing to the fact that the unattainable is strangely alluring to womankind. I, being a man, shall not, of course, dwell upon the foibles of my own sex. It were a foolish candor. As I said, there will be some good fighting ahead of us, for love and battle usually go together. One must have warm, rich blood to do either well; and, save religion, there is no source more fruitful of quarrels and death than that passion which is the source of life. You, of course, know without the telling, that I reached land safely after I scuttled the boat, else I should not be writing this forty years afterwards.