There we have the reality of which Stevenson’s tales are the reflection and the traditional imitation. Again--“If he challenges, I shall have my choice of weapons. I am pretty good master of the small sword, and think I could contrive to disarm him and make him beg on his knees, for I am sure he is one of the most arrant cowards.”... Again--“They passed along the beach at full gallop not far from us, and I gave them a rifle ball which missed them.”... In another place--“But one of them held his head out long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a rifle ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall. Said I ‘A moment more and I may fall in the same way.’”... On another occasion--“I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily was not called to one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the high sides of the vessel.”... It must be remembered that inasmuch as Howe was a surgeon he had no right to be fighting at all; but dear me! we are on the Spanish main in Elizabeth’s time; and, as Howe observed a few days later, “I had been directed to keep below, but the scene was too interesting for a young man to lose sight of.”... There was a touch of the buccaneer about Howe. His slight tendency toward lawlessness kept cropping out all through his life. It appears in an assault which he made on a sentinel at Rome in 1844, and in all his anti-slavery work--of which later. A great descriptive power is revealed in this journal, which he kept during the months when he often slept with his head on a stone and subsisted on fried wasps. As an example of vivid sketching take the following: