Juan of Austria loathed this place as passionately as he had loved Naples and Sicily; the plain with the two rivers embracing the frowning town of Namur seemed to him hateful as some roadway to Hell; he dreaded the warm moist nights, the long misty days, the veiled Northern skies, the flat, distant melancholy horizon, and he hated these things more because he sometimes felt that he would never see any other skies or fields but these, never see any moon or sun rise over any town but this high battlemented fortress of Namur. He was trapped, abandoned, forgotten; the hero of Lepanto, the conqueror of Tunis, was left to die miserably in this vile swamp–forsaken! He resolved, when the fever left his mind clear, that he would not die, that he would live to face Philip in the Escurial and demand an account for this–and for other things. On September 28th he confessed, on the 28th he received the communion. His confessor, Francisco Orantes, told him that he was dying, but he laughed that away. In the evening of that day he fell into a delirium and for two days tossed unconscious, in great torments, talking continually of wars, of soldiers, of conquests and arms. On the first of October the fever abated and he seemed much recovered; he fell into a little sleep about the dawn, and when it was fully light he woke and sent for the Prince of Parma. When that general came, Juan of Austria raised himself on his elbow and looked at him with a searching kind of eagerness, and Farnese stood arrested, in the poor doorway, glaring at the sick man. The pigeon-house, in which Don Juan lay, was the size of a small tent, of clay with niches in the walls for the birds; part of the tiled roof and a portion of one wall had gone, and through this the early, misty Northern sunlight streamed, for the canvas that had been dragged over the aperture was drawn away to admit the air. On the rough mud floor a carpet of arras had been flung; there were a couple of camp chairs of steel and leather; a pile of armour, helmet, greaves, cuirass, cruises, vambraces, damascened in black and gold and hung with scarlet straps, was in one corner; above swung a lantern and a crucifix. Facing the entrance the Emperor’s son lay on a pile of rich cloaks and garments embroidered with a thousand colours in a thousand shapes of fantasy; two cloth of gold cushions served to support his head and gleamed incongruously against the dull clay wall. He was himself swathed to the breast in a mantle of black and orange, and covering his lower limbs was a robe of crimson samite lined with fox’s fur. The fine ruffled shirt he wore had been torn in his delirious struggles and showed his throat and the gaunt lines of his shoulders.