The Puritans afterwards translated the verse, "Let him sing _psalms_." But the Genevan translators (whom in this book I follow in their first edition of 1560) more mercifully left out the "psalms": "_Is any merry, let him sing!_" say they. Now such was the fashion of the men who fought for Henry IV. Even D'Aubigné, the greatest of all--historian, poet, and satirist--expelled from France for over-rigidity, found himself equally in danger in Geneva because of the liberty of his Muse's wing. So, though the Abbé John became a suffering and warring Huguenot, on grounds good and sufficient to his own conscience, he remained ever the lad he was when he scuffled on the Barricades for the "Good Guise"--and the better fighting! A little added head-knowledge does not change men. No motives are ever simple. No eye ever quite single. And I will not say what force, if any, the knowledge that Francis Agnew the Scot would never give his daughter in marriage to a Persecutor of the Brethren, had in bringing about the Abbé John's decision. Perhaps none at all--I do not know. I am no man's judge. The weight which such an argument might have with oneself is all any man can know. And that is, after all, perhaps best left unstated. At first John was all for revealing his name and quality; but against this Francis Agnew warned him At present he was treated as a pressed man, escaping the "hempen breakfasts of the heretic dogs"--which the captain, the young Duke d'Err, often commanded the "comite" to serve out to those condemned for their faith. Only the Turks, of whom there were a good many, captured during the Levantine wars, strong, grave, sturdy men, were better treated than he. "If, then," said his companion, "they know that you are a cousin of the Bearnais, they will most likely send you to the Holy Bonfire, especially as you are of too light weight to row in the galley, at any rate." The Abbé John cried out against this. He was as good as any man, in the galley or elsewhere. "In intent, yes," said the Scot, "but your weight is as nothing to Hamal's or even mine, when it comes to pulling at fifty foot of oar on an upper deck!" The Duke of Err was a young nobleman who had early ruined himself by evil life. The memory rankled, so that sometimes the very devil of cruelty seemed to ride him. He would order the most brutal acts for sport, and laugh afterwards as they threw the dead slaves over, hanging crucifixes, Korans, or Genevan Bibles about their necks in mockery according to their creed. "My galley is lighter by so much carrion!" he would say on such occasions. It chanced that in the late autumn, when the great heats were beginning to abate and the equinoctials had not yet begun to blow on that exposed eastern coast of Spain, that for a private reason the Duke-Captain desired to be at Tarragona by nightfall. So all that day the slaves were driven by the "executioners"--as the Duke invariably named his "comites"--till they prayed for death.