cience-stricken at the fearful thirst for blood which had suddenly
boiled up within him as he felt his enemy under him.

The onlookers were struck dumb with astonishment; they had taken for
granted that he would, as a matter of course, have used his right of
splitting his vanquished opponent's skull--an event which they would
of course have deeply deplored, but with which, as men of honour, they
could not on any account interfere, but merely console themselves for
the loss of their comrade by flaying his conqueror alive, 'carving him
into the blood-eagle,' or any other delicate ceremony which might serve
as a vent for their sorrow and a comfort to the soul of the deceased.

Smid rose, with a bill in his hand, and looked round him-perhaps to
see what was expected of him. He half lifted his weapon to strike ....
Philammon, seated, looked him calmly in the face.... The old warrior's
eye caught the bank, which was now receding rapidly past them; and when
he saw that they were really floating downwards again, without an
effort to stem the stream, he put away his bill, and sat himself down
deliberately in his place, astonishing the onlookers quite as much as
Philammon had done.

'Five minutes' good fighting, and no one killed! This is a shame!' quoth
another. 'Blood we must see, and it had better be yours, master monk,
than your betters','--and therewith he rushed on poor Philammon.

He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had
been awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not
frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous cruelty
of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon over on his
back, deliberated by what death he should die.

Philammon quietly submitted--if submission have anything to do with that
state of mind in which sheer astonishment and novelty have broken up all
the custom of man's nature, till the strangest deeds and sufferings are
taken as matters of course. His sudden escape from the Laura, the new
world of thought and action into which he had been plunged, the new
companions with whom he had fallen in, had driven him utterly from his
moorings, and now anything and everything might happen to him. He who
had promised never to look upon woman found himself, by circumstances
over which he had no control, amid a boatful of the most objectionable
species of that most objectionable genus--and the utterly worst having
happened, everything else whi