The daring escapes that Cervantes planned, the intrepid courage with which he set himself to invent new schemes when the old ones miscarried; the indomitable cheerfulness he always maintained, and especially the spell he exercised over his master, the brutal Hassan Pasha of evil memory, are sufficient to mark him as a man of extraordinary resource, magnetism, and force of character. Delí Mamí, misled by the letters which were found upon the person of his captive, regarded Cervantes as a man of position and substance, and the treatment meted out to him was the more severe, in order that his family would the more speedily effect his release. These Algerine pirates lived upon the ransoms which they extorted from the friends of their captives; and at the time of Cervantes’ bondage, no fewer than 25,000 Christians, including many men of rank and fortune, were waiting the arrival of the price of their freedom, and frequently enlivening the monotony of their servitude by attempting to escape. Cervantes earned a peculiar celebrity among this army of captives by the ingenuity and persistence of the plans he put into practice in order to achieve the ambition of every bondman. But while his courage became proverbial, and his craft amazed both his captors and his fellow-prisoners, his ill-luck ever intervened to frustrate his best-laid plans. A further reference may be permitted here to the influence which Cervantes exercised upon his barbarous gaoler, Hassan Pasha, who had purchased him from Delí Mamí for the sum of 500 gold crowns. The author of _Don Quixote_ has told us (Part I., Chapter xi.) of “the unheard-of and unseen cruelties which my master practised on the Christians. Every day he hanged a slave; impaled one; cut off the ears of another; and this upon so [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF CERVANTES, MODELLED BY ROSENDO NOBAS, UNDER THE DIRECTION OF DON LEOPOLD RIUS.]