id.

"No, my lord," he answered bitterly. "Of the Holy Inquisition."

"You are a Protestant?"

He bowed.

On that I fell to considering him with more attention, but at the same
time with some distrust; reflecting that he was a Spaniard, and
recalling the numberless plots against his Majesty of which that nation
had been guilty. Still, if his tale were true he deserved support;
with a view therefore to testing this I questioned him farther, and
learned that he had for a long time disguised his opinions, until,
opening them in an easy moment to a fellow servant, he found himself
upon the first occasion of quarrel betrayed to the Fathers. After
suffering much, and giving himself up for lost in their dungeons, he
made his escape in a manner sufficiently remarkable, if I might believe
his story. In the prison with him lay a Moor, for whose exchange
against a Christian taken by the Sallee pirates an order came down. It
arrived in the evening; the Moor was to be removed in the morning. An
hour after the arrival of the news, however, and when the two had just
been locked up for the night, the Moor, overcome with excess of joy,
suddenly expired. At first the Spaniard was for giving the alarm; but,
being an ingenious fellow, in a few minutes he summoned all his wits
together and made a plan. Contriving to blacken his face and hands
with charcoal he changed clothes with the corpse, and muffling himself
up after the fashion of the Moors in a cold climate he succeeded in the
early morning in passing out in his place. Those who had charge of him
had no reason to expect an escape, and once on the road he had little
difficulty in getting away, and eventually reached France after a
succession of narrow chances.

All this the man told me so simply that I knew not which to admire
more, the daring of his device--since for a white man to pass for a
brown is beyond the common scope of such disguises--or his present
modesty in relating it. However, neither of these things seemed to my
mind a good reason for disbelief. As to the one, I considered that an
impostor would have put forward something more simple; and as to the
other, I have all my life long observed that those who have had strange
experiences tell them in a very ordinary way. Besides, I had fresh in
my mind the diverting escape of the Duke of Nemours from Lyons, which I
have elsewhere related. On the other hand, and despite all these
things, the story might be fa