To meet, when alone, with two ruffians, to pretend, being on foot and decidedly shabby, to be a beggar; and to pass them thus, not only without loss, but with 1s. 2d. towards his next meal—such was the experience of one Englishman abroad. But what could he have done had the beasts been four-legged ones? Here was another risk to run; and, perhaps, to pay for. There were plenty to meet. It is not surprising to read of them breaking into stables and ransacking cemeteries in Muscovy, where, by the way, protection against them was supposed to be secured by the noise of a big stick dragging at the back of the sledge by a rope; but things were little better near Paris. Readers of Rabelais may recollect a second narrow escape that befell the six pilgrims whom Gargantua ate in a salad in consequence of their hiding among the lettuces to avoid being eaten by him as meat. After their miraculous escape out of his mouth, they barely saved themselves from falling into a snare for wolves. It was no exaggeration to write so about Touraine; in the winter of 1653 a pack entered Blois and ate a child. And just before Evelyn visited Fontainebleau, "a lynx or ounce" had killed some one passing thither by the highroad from Paris. The country between Geneva and Lyons, again, writes one who passed through it, was "mainly inhabited by wolves and bears." [Illustration: "WOLVES"] But we have not finished with people. Slavery had to be reckoned with, and therefore ransoms. More than one refers to the "malcontents" of the Low Countries, unpaid Spanish garrison-soldiers who wandered about on the look-out for Englishmen in particular, and esteeming a younger brother's ransom at twenty thousand crowns of the sun [£35,000], says Wotton. But the risk of capture, in the ordinary way, was confined to Mohammedan territory and the neighbouring seashores, with Algiers as headquarters. Many men who were slaves there at this period have left record of their adventures; of whom Gramaye is perhaps the best to quote from, inasmuch as no one was a more acute, thorough, and trustworthy observer. He lived at Algiers in 1619, one of twenty thousand Christian slaves. According to the statistics he gives of the previous twelve years, two hundred and fifty-one ships had brought in twelve thousand, two hundred and forty prisoners, of whom eight hundred and fifty-seven Germans had apostatised, three hundred English, one hundred and thirty-eight from Hamburg, "Danes and Easterlings" one hundred and sixty; Poles, Hungarians, and Muscovites two hundred and fifty, Low Countrymen one hundred and thirty; besides French and others. Fewest renegades came from Spain and Italy, because in those two countries alone were permanent systematic collectors of money for ransoms; the two orders of the Trinity and of Our Lady of Pity paid out sixty-three thousand ducats [over £70,000], in this way yearly, a drain of gold which does not seem to have been taken into account by