This I did, though still in an extreme confusion of mind, and the troop of sailors gathered round me, and, keeping close together, pushed through the crowd, swaggering mightily, and using their fists not a little, and reviling the Portugals in good round English for not making a way for them. Thus we passed through the crowd, that was now thronging every street and bridge that led from the burning-place, and pouring into the city itself. Prisoners and tipstaves and nobles and officers and godfathers were all pressed and thwacked together, and all ran and cried to take refuge in the fortress, and to shut the gates on the Morattys. Now all this seemed very greatly to divert the honest fellows that had me in charge, so that I heard them laughing and jesting among themselves as if the whole matter were but a play. But when at last we got clear of the bridges and causeys, and come to the place where a ship’s boat was moored with two men left in her, they stopped for a moment, and mounted upon a great pile of timber that lay hard by for to see better. Then as they became quiet, looking and hearkening, there seemed to be borne to me upon the air the sound of fighting, and a great cry, as of rage or victory, that was in no Christian tongue, but had the sound of-- “_Hoor! Hoor! Mohawdio!_”[79] and this we heard again and again. Then he that seemed the chief of the seamen swore a great oath, and came down from the wood-pile with a pale face, for, “On my life” (says he), “the Morattys are really there.” “And why not there, sir?” says I. “Sure that is what the people have been crying all the time.” “Ay,” says he, “but they wan’t there until now. We raised a false alarm for to get your honour away safely.” “Then how came the Morattys?” I asked, with much amazement. “Nay, that you must ask of their father the devil, for I can’t tell,” says he. But I preferred to ascribe this marvel rather to the direction of Almighty God, who, knowing, as I have no doubt, that the confusion raised by a false alarm should not suffice for to convey me away to a place of safety, used the designs of the Morattys to bring ’em to that spot at the very time they were needed. The sailors would willingly have stayed long watching the fight, but their leader called them away, and we rowed down the river in the boat, I being laid in the bottom and covered with a sail. So at last we come to a ship, and when we went on board of her, I seemed to myself to have seen her before, but so confused was I in my intellectuals that I could neither recollect when nor how. Then the master carried me into his cabin, and poured out for me a dram of cordial water, and bade me drink it, and thereafter slapped me on the back and demanded of me whether I had forgot my old friends. But I could only gaze upon him bewildered, and answer nothing.