There was a large table in the room, and I intrenched myself at once behind this, armed with a light cane chair, while I screamed murder in every language I could command. Failing to reach me across the table, my assailant tried to dodge me by false starts, now at this side, now at that. Though a large fleshy man, he was not inactive, and it required all my quickness to escape him. These manoeuvres being unsuccessful, he very quickly placed a chair beside the table and mounted upon it. I now hurled my chair at him; he warded off the blow and rushed on; with one spring I bounded under the table, reappearing at the opposite side just as he had reached mine. These tactics we now pursued for several minutes, when my enemy suddenly changed his attack, and, descending from the table, he turned it on edge; the effort required strength. I seized the moment and reached the door; I tore it open in some fashion, gained the stairs, the court, the streets, and ran ever onward with the wildness of one possessed with no time for thought, nor any knowledge to guide; I turned left and right, choosing only the narrowest lanes that presented themselves, and at last came to a dead halt at an open drawbridge, where a crowd stood waiting to pass.
“How is this? What's all the hurry for? Where are you running this fashion?” cried a well-known voice. I turned, and saw the skipper of the packet.
“Are you armed? Can you defend me?” cried I, in terror; “or shall I leap in and swim for it?”
“I'll stand by you. Don't be afraid, man,” said he, drawing my arm within his; “no one shall harm you. Were they robbers?”
“No, worse,—assassins!” said I, gulping, for I was heartily ashamed of my terror, and determined to show “cause why” in the plural.
“Come in here, and have a glass of something,” said he, turning into a little cabaret, with whose penetralia he seemed not unfamiliar. “You 're all safe here,” said he, as he closed the door of a little room. “Let's hear all about it, though I half guess the story already.”
I had no difficulty in perceiving, from my companion's manner, that he believed some sudden shock had shaken my faculties, and that my intellects were for the time deranged; nor was it very easy for me to assume sufficient calm to disabuse him of his error, and assert my own perfect coherency. “You have been out for a lark,” said he, laughingly. “I see it all. You have been at one of those tea-gardens and got into a row with some stout Fleming. All the young English go through that sort of thing. Ain't I right?”
“Never more mistaken in your life, Captain. My conduct since I landed would not discredit a canon of St. Paul's. In fact, all my habits, my tastes, my instincts, are averse to every sort of junketing. I am essentially retiring, sensitive, And, if you will, over-fastidious in my choice of associates. My story is simply this.” My reader will readily excuse my repeating what is already known to him. It is enough if I say that the captain, although anything rather than mirthful, held his hand several times over his face, and once laughed out loudly and boisterously.