’"If I be a man," you say—who said that I was a man? Do I act as other men? Is my knowledge like that of other men? Do I company with other men? Call you that a man?’ (He pointed to Sawny Bean, who for wantonness sat on an upturned tub, striking with a keen-edged knife at the legs of all that came by for mere delight of blood, storming at them meantime with horrid imprecations to approach nearer and be flicked.) ’Or call you these men?’ (He showed me some of the younger cannibal race gnawing like kennelled dogs at horrid bones.) ’Nay, my dainty wanton, you shall not enter Hell through the brave brattle of warring blades, nor yet handling your rapier like a morris-dancer. But as the blood drains to the white from the stricken calf, so shall they whiten your flesh for the tooth, and so reluctantly shall your life drip from you drop by drop.’ And I declare that this scornful fiend telling me of tortures in choice words made me scunner more than the prick of the knife. For the abhorred invention quickened the imagination and set the nerves agate. So that I was honestly glad when he took knife in hand—a shoemaker’s curved blade with a keen cutting edge. ’Strip him naked!’ he cried. And very cheerfully so they did, smiting me the meantime with the broad of their hand. Then John Mure leaned over me delicately, and made as though he would have traced with his knife the jointing of my limbs, saying, ’Thus and thus shall the she-tribe dismember your body when the torture of the ant’s nest is ended.’ And again ’Here is toothsome eating, Sawny Bean, thou chief lover of dainty vivers.’ Then, as the evil man went on with his pitiless jestings, his grey cloak began to waver before me, his face to glow like fire, and I fainted or dwamed away till the sharp knife pricked me into consciousness again. Yet Auchendrayne overdid his threatening, for the too sharp relish of the words issued in tranced dulness ere the matter came to action. And of torture there was none that I can now remember or bear the mark of—save only the slight scores of the knife which he made when he showed me where they would joint and haggle my body. Indeed, I mind no more till I came to myself, lying on my back, with the cave all empty save for John Mure—who sat, as before, with his hand to his ear listening. But there sounded a great and furious uproar down by the cave mouth, the deep baying of bloodhounds, the fierce cry of many voices striving for mastery, and above all the shrieks of the smitten. Surely, I thought, there is a battle fierce and fell at the cave’s mouth. John Mure sat and listened for a long space, and presently he looked over at me. ’I will even make sure of him, come what may,’ he said. And with that he took the knife and came nearer to smite me in the breast, and I lay as one dead already, waiting for the stroke.