Rashly—perhaps too rashly—the _English Merchantman_ measured her strength against a great Spanish galleon and two smaller vessels, with which she fell in off Juan Fernandez. Gallant was the fight maintained by the English ship, but it was too unequal even for that day of marvellous naval achievements. After five hours’ hard fighting she was glad to get away, crippled and sorely raked, yet unconquered. But Walter Grey was reported missing. No man saw his face again, after that first mad rush upon the enemies’ deck in which he had borne his part so bravely. And could his comrades have seen his face six months afterwards they would not have recognized him. Well would it have been for him had he died of the wound that separated him from his countrymen, and left him a helpless captive in the hands of the Spaniards, and at the mercy of the Holy Inquisition. By that hideous magician the bright-eyed, fair-haired English youth was soon transformed into a gaunt skeleton, old in misery, if still young in years. In pursuance of his sentence at an auto-da-fé in Lima, he took his place on the narrow wooden bench of a Spanish galley, and chained to three other wretches, toiled with them at the task of moving one of its forty great oars. Here—it is a fellow-sufferer who speaks—his food was a scanty allowance of “coarse black biscuit and water, his lodging was the bare boards and planks of the galley, and hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes he lacked none.”[44] But, it will be asked, had Walter Grey no alternative? Did men come forth from the gates of that gloomy “Santa Casa,” only to take their places in Spanish galleys? Not always. Some there were who wrestled boldly with the Inquisition fiend and overcame him, finding man’s worst God’s best, and death the gate of glory. But each of these crowned conquerors possessed a talisman, whose marvellous virtue bore them through the fiercest conflict,—even that white stone “wherein is written a new name, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.” Walter Grey had not this talisman. Yet for the honour of his country, for the remembrance of the lessons learned beside his mother’s knee, he had borne much, and with heroic spirit. He knew that the creed he had been taught in childhood was true. But then he did not know that its promises were true _for him_. Perhaps they were, perhaps they were not; and like far wiser men, Walter Grey found it “hard to die for a perhaps.” So at last his heart failed him. He became a Penitent; and he experienced the tender mercies of the Inquisition towards returning penitents. He was sent to the galleys—for twenty years, or for life. He scarcely knew how the sentence ran; and in fact it did not matter.