Let us look at this man as he goes gnawing his hand in rage and disappointment.  There is something familiar about his face and bearing, still gallant enough in a fashion, yet the most observant would find it difficult to recognise in the Senor Ramiro the handsome and courtly Count Juan de Montalvo of over twenty years before.  A long spell of the galleys changes the hardiest man, and by ill luck Montalvo, or Ramiro, to call him by his new name, had been forced to serve nearly his full time.  He would have escaped earlier indeed, had he not been foolish enough to join in a mutiny, which was discovered and suppressed.  It was in the course of this savage struggle for freedom that he lost his eye, knocked out with a belaying pin by an officer whom he had just stabbed.  The innocent officer died and the rascal Ramiro died, but without his good looks.

To a person of gentle birth, however great a scoundrel he might be, the galleys, which represented penal servitude in the sixteenth century, were a very rough school.  Indeed for the most part the man who went into them blameless became bad, and the man who went into them bad became worse, for, as the proverb says, those who have dwelt in hell always smell of brimstone.  Who can imagine the awfulness of it—­the chains, the arduous and continual labour, the whip of the quarter-masters, the company of thieves and outcast ruffians, all dreadful in its squalid sameness?

Well, his strength and constitution, coupled with a sort of grim philosophy, brought him through, and at length Ramiro found himself a free man, middle-aged indeed, but intelligent and still strong, the world once more before him.  Yet what a world!  His wife, believing him dead, or perhaps wishing to believe it, had remarried and gone with her husband to New Spain, taking his children with her, and his friends, such of them as lived, turned their backs upon him.  But although he had been an unlucky man, for with him wickedness had not prospered, he still had resource and courage.

The Count Montalvo was a penniless outlaw, a byword and a scorn, and so the Count Montalvo—­died, and was buried publicly in the church of his native village.  Strangely enough, however, about the same time the Senor Ramiro appeared in another part of Spain, where with success he practised as a notary and man of affairs.  Some years went by thus, till at length, having realised a considerable sum of money by the help of an ingenious fraud, of which the details are superfluous, an inspiration took him and he sailed for the Netherlands.

In those dreadful days, in order to further the ends of religious persecution and of legalised theft, informers were rewarded with a portion of the goods of heretics.  Ramiro’s idea—­a great one in its way—­was to organise this informing business, and, by interesting a number of confederates who practically were shareholders in the venture, to sweep into his net more fortunes, or shares of fortunes, than a single