my trunk caused him surprise and wonder. He asked me to tell him the age of each. On finding some rosaries, he exclaimed—‘Ah, you are a priest!’ I told him no, but had bought the rosaries at a fair at Madrid as curiosities. He, however, with great devotion kissed the crosses suspended to them with other emblems, but finding they were of silver, he broke the stones, letting them all fall to the ground. He carefully picked them up, and again kissed each bead and emblem, but at the same time renewed his oaths at his awkwardness. He secured these, and everything else he thought valuable, between his shirt and his skin, but my clothes and linen he put into a large sack, which appeared to be the common receptacle. I had also some small knives and daggers. He asked what I did with them. I told him they had been sold to me as having been worn by the Manolas of Spain under their garters. At this he laughed, and throwing two of them to the ground to me, he put the rest into his private magazine. “I hoped to make something of my grand brigand, but while I was talking to him the captain came up suddenly, and struck me with violence on the back of the neck with the butt-end of his carbine, saying, in a furious tone, ‘You are looking in his face that you might be able to recognise him!’ He then seized me by the right arm, while another took my left, and they again bound them behind my back. In my bad Spanish, I assured them I was a foreigner from the remote county of Middlesex; but they would not have cared had I been Joseph Hume himself, and threw me down like a sheep tied fast together ready for the slaughter, upon the body of the Hollander, who roared out loudly, and shook most convulsively all over, imploring the brigands not to kill him, for that he had several bills to take up on the 10th proximo at Amsterdam; beside which he had a wife, six children, and two sisters-in-law dependent upon him for support, and an aged mother and two children of a deceased brother. One of the brigands laughed at hearing all this, although he could not understand it in High-Dutch; but I, who knew a little of the language, ventured to translate it for him, which made the chief brigand laugh ten times more. Taking one of the crucifixes found on me he held it before his eyes, and told him to be at once a Catholic, and he would spare his life. ‘Kiss the cross,’ he said ‘or I will cut your throat!’ This was a plain and simple proposition, and the method of its solution freely given. However, much to the honour and glory of the Dutchman, he resolutely refused to do any such thing, and told the brigand that ‘he might kill him if he liked, and that God would take care of all those dependent upon him;’ and when the cross was again presented to his lips, the burly Dutchman turned himself right over on his side, and the ground on which he lay being upon a slight declivity, he began to roll, and his descent being accelerated