"Peace!" replied Don Quixote, who had been badly shaken by the fall. "I am verily persuaded that the cursed necromancer Freston, who continues to persecute me, has transformed these giants into windmills. But, mark you, in the end all his pernicious wiles and stratagems shall prove ineffectual against the prevailing edge of my sword." The Story of the Captive One of the most remarkable of the tales which are interspersed throughout the history of Don Quixote is that of the captive which the hero encounters at a certain inn, and which, if it is not actually based upon the facts of Cervantes' own personal captivity among the Moorish pirates, certainly draws much of its substance and colour therefrom. On 26th September, 1575, the Spanish vessel Sol, on which Cervantes served as a private soldier, was separated from the rest of the Spanish squadron in the neighbourhood of Marseilles, and, falling in with a flotilla of Moorish pirates, was captured after a desperate resistance. Cervantes himself was sold as a slave to one Dali Mami, a Greek renegade, who found upon his prisoner certain highly eulogistic letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sessa. These flattering credentials led his new master to suppose that Cervantes was a man of consequence, and that he would presumably be able to draw a large ransom for him. But although the great are often quite ready to provide genius with grandiloquent testimonials which cost them only the expense of a little ink and paper, they are by no means prone to back their assertions of ability by tabling large sums of money, and Cervantes continued to languish in captivity. In 1576 he attempted to escape with other prisoners, but their Moorish guide played them false, and, threatened by hunger, the party was forced to return to Algiers. In the following year Cervantes' brother was ransomed, and he undertook to send a vessel to carry off Miguel and his friends. Meanwhile the author of Don Quixote enlisted the sympathies of a Spanish renegade, a Navarrese gardener named Juan. Between them they dug a cave in a garden near the sea, and secreted in it, one by one, fourteen Christian slaves, who were secretly fed during several months by the help of another renegade known as El Dorador. The vessel sent by Rodrigo de Cervantes stood in to the shore, and was on the point of embarking those hidden in the cave when a Moorish fishing-boat passed by, and so alarmed the rescuers that they put to sea again. Meanwhile the treacherous El Dorador had revealed the plan to Hassan Pasha, the Dey of Algiers, and when several of the crew of rescuers landed on a second occasion to convey the fugitives on board, the Dey's troops surrounded the garden, and the entire band of Christians was captured. Cervantes, with that true nobility which characterized him throughout life, took the entire blame of the conspiracy upon himself. Dragged bound before Hassan, he adhered to his statement,