A set of curious
chances led him to take service with the Dutch, then at war with France;
and a predilection for the sea made him elect that this service should
be upon that element. He had the advantage of a commission under the
famous de Ruyter, and fought in the Mediterranean engagement in which
that great Dutch admiral lost his life.

After the Peace of Nimeguen his movements are obscure. But we know that
he spent two years in a Spanish prison, though we do not know how he
contrived to get there. It may be due to this that upon his release
he took his sword to France, and saw service with the French in their
warring upon the Spanish Netherlands. Having reached, at last, the age
of thirty-two, his appetite for adventure surfeited, his health having
grown indifferent as the result of a neglected wound, he was suddenly
overwhelmed by homesickness. He took ship from Nantes with intent to
cross to Ireland. But the vessel being driven by stress of weather
into Bridgewater Bay, and Blood's health having grown worse during the
voyage, he decided to go ashore there, additionally urged to it by the
fact that it was his mother's native soil.

Thus in January of that year 1685 he had come to Bridgewater, possessor
of a fortune that was approximately the same as that with which he had
originally set out from Dublin eleven years ago.

Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly restored
to him, and because he conceived that he had passed through adventures
enough for a man's lifetime, he determined to settle there, and take
up at last the profession of medicine from which he had, with so little
profit, broken away.

That is all his story, or so much of it as matters up to that night, six
months later, when the battle of Sedgemoor was fought.

Deeming the impending action no affair of his, as indeed it was not, and
indifferent to the activity with which Bridgewater was that night agog,
Mr. Blood closed his ears to the sounds of it, and went early to bed. He
was peacefully asleep long before eleven o'clock, at which hour, as
you know, Monmouth rode but with his rebel host along the Bristol Road,
circuitously to avoid the marshland that lay directly between himself
and the Royal Army. You also know that his numerical advantage--possibly
counter-balanced by the greater steadiness of the regular troops on the
other side--and the advantages he derived from falling by surprise upon
an army that was more or less asl