‘To London, no doubt?’ quoth I. ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘but there I found neither gold nor silver in the streets, and I lived for some months a very unedifying vagabond sort of life, knees and elbows being generally very bare, and stomach generally very hungry. At length, being hard driven, I e’en enlisted, though it went hard against my conscience, under Old Noll. Such drilling, such fighting, and such psalm-singing. The sergeant’s ratan was never off our shoulders, except when he was exhorting us in the pulpit, or standing on a horseblock, calling the royalists sons of Agag. So, this going on for some time, and I trying in vain to become a saint, for which I had not sufficient bad qualities, I e’en took leave to desert; and because the land was too hot to hold me, I became a mariner and went to sea. But at sea, Will, I saw one great sight, I saw the king land on the beach of Dover, and having long observed that seasons of rejoicing are seasons of hospitality, I treated my ship as I had done my regiment, and followed the royal train up to London. That was indeed a march. All the country flocked to the road to see the king come back to his own again. It was nothing but eating and drinking, and up caps, “Huzza for King Charles, and to the devil with the Rump!” Well, on Blackheath, near London, was drawn up my own old regiment. ‘Gad, the sun was on my side of the hedge now, for there stood our sergeant as grim as Beelzebub in the sulks, and I having many pottles of wine in me, gave a tug to his grizzled moustache, and asked what he thought of me for a son of Agag now. I warrant you Old Ironside used his halberd with very little discretion by way of reply, and so I came away with a bloody cockscomb. But all was one for that. Wine was a great balm, and I applied it plenteously; being indeed in a very loyal state of drunkenness for certain days, I know not how many, until, having a little recovered, I found myself in the filthy hold of a ship with other ragamuffins; some sober and weeping, some drunk and singing, and some ill with the small-pox and jail fever, raving and dying. Then I presently understood that all this goodly company was bound on a voyage to the plantations in Barbadoes—we having, it seems, signed articles to that effect, in consideration of certain small sums of money, which they told us we had received, and spent in drink very jovially, and as became stout-hearted fellows. I made a bold attempt to escape by knocking down the sentry at the hatchway, but all I gained by the proceeding was a pair of very heavy irons, which were put on near the Tower, and which were not knocked off until we were three days’ sail from Barbadoes. There I landed, and, being duly sold, was set to labour with sundry other companions in misfortune amongst the sugar-canes. In a few months I was one of a very few survivors, but being very weak and sickly from two fevers which I had, I was not very sharply looked after, and so I managed, without