I HAVE sat over against Death unnumbered times in the course of a long and perilous life, and he has appeared to me in almost every shape; but I shall never forget that Thirtieth of January in the year '20, when my Grandmother died. I have seen men all gashed and cloven about--a very mire of blood and wounds,--and heads lying about on the floor like ninepins, among the Turks, where a man's life is as cheap as the Halfpenny Hatch. I was with that famous Commander Baron Trenck[D] when his Pandours--of whom I was one--broke into Mutiny. He drew a pistol from his belt, and said, "I shall decimate you." And he began to count Ten, "one, two, three, four," and so on, till he came to the tenth man, whom he shot Dead. And then he took to counting again, until he was arrived at the second Tenth. That man's brains he also blew out. I was the tenth of the third batch, but I never blenched. Trenck happily held his hand before he came to Me. The Pandours cried out that they would submit, although I never spoke a word; he forgave us; and I had a flask of Tokay with him in his tent that very after-dinner. I have seen a man keel-hauled at sea, and brought up on the other side, his face all larded with barnacles like a Shrove-tide capon. Thrice I have stood beneath the yardarm with the rope round my neck (owing to a king's ship mistaking the character of my vessel).[E] I have seen men scourged till the muscles of their backs were laid bare as in a Theatre of Anatomy; I have watched women's limbs crackle and frizzle in the flames at an Act of Faith, with the King and Court--ay, and the court-ladies too--looking on. I stood by when that poor mad wretch Damiens was pulled to pieces by horses in the Grève. I have seen what the plague could do in the galleys at Marseilles. Death and I have been boon companions and bedfellows. He has danced a jig with me on a plank, and ridden bodkin, and gone snacks with me for a lump of horse-flesh in a beleaguered town; but no man can say that John Dangerous had aught but a bold face to show that Phantom who frights nursemaids and rich idle people so.