orman
sailors, who had taken him on board. It was well for me, for I
doubt if ever I was tough enough to have withstood my good friends'
treatment. He had me carried to a convent in Havre, where the
fathers nursed me well; and before I was on my legs again, I had
made up my mind to cast in my lot with them, or rather with their
Church."

"Oh!"

"I had been baulked of winning the one being near whom my devil
never durst come. And blood-letting had pretty well disposed of
him. I was as meek and mild as milk under the good fathers.
Moreover, as my good friend at Turin had told me, and they repeated
it, such a doubly heretical baptism as mine was probably invalid,
and accounted for my being as much a vessel of wrath as even my
father was pleased to call me. There was the Queen's rosary drawing
me too. Everything else was over with me, and it seemed to open a
new life. So, bless me, what a soft and pious frame I was in when
they chastened me, water, oil, salt and all, on what my father raged
at folks calling Lammas Day, but which it seems really belongs to
St. Peter in the Fetters. So I was named Pierre or Piers after him,
thus keeping my own initial."

"Piers! oh! not Piers Pigwiggin?"

"Pierre de Pilpignon, if you please. I have a right to that too;
but we shall come to it by and by. I can laugh now, or perhaps
weep, over the fervid state I was in then, as if I had trodden down
my snake, and by giving up everything--you, estate, career, I could
keep him down. So it was settled that I would devote myself to the
priesthood--don't laugh!--and I was ordered off to their seminary in
London, partly, I believe, for the sake of piloting a couple of
fathers, who could not speak a word of English. It was, as they
rightly judged, the last place where my father would think of
looking for me, but they did not as rightly judge that we should
long keep possession there. Matters grew serious, and it was not
over safe in the streets. There was a letter of importance from a
friend in Holland, carrying the Prince of Orange's hypocritical
Declaration, which was to be got to Father Petre or the King on the
night--Hallowmas Eve it was--and I was told off to put on a secular
dress, which I could wear more naturally than most of them, and
convey it."

"Ah, that explains!"

"Apparition number one! I guessed you were somewhere in those
parts, and looked up at the windows, and though I did not see you, I
believe it was your