what long-drawn horrors a mortal could endure.  Whenever I attempted to walk the iron mass fastened to my leg would ‘bring me up short,’ often, in my early forgetfulness of it, throwing me prone upon my face.  After a little I learned to move with a halting gait, striding out with the free limb and pausing to pull my burden after me with the other.  This habit, learned in the squalor and darkness of the dungeon hells of Ceuta, I have never been able to unlearn.

“It was many days before I could see how anything short of a miracle could enable me to escape.  I tried to calmly reason it all out, and every time came to the same horrible conclusion, viz.:  I must rot there unless help came to me from without.  This seemed impossible, and all the horrors of a lingering death stared me in the face.  Every two or three days one of the jailers would come to the slit in the masonry and leave there a dish of water and a few crusts of bread.  I tried on one occasion to speak with him, but he only laughed in my face and turned away.  Finally I hit upon a plan which seemed to offer the only possible means of escape.  In my college days I was well acquainted with M. Charcot, and even assisted in some of his earlier hypnotic experiments.  The subject interested me, and I followed it closely till I became something of an adept myself.  There were in those days but few people I could not mesmerise, provided sufficient opportunity were allowed me for hypnotic suggestion.  I determined to see if any of this old power still remained with me, and, if so, to strive to render my jailer subservient to my will.  But how should I keep him within ear-shot long enough to work upon him?  Clearly all appeals to pity were useless.  I must excite his greed, nothing else would reach him.  This was not an easy thing to do without a sou in my possession, yet I did it.  When I heard his step I crawled to the opening in the wall and mumbled in a crazy sort of a way about a hidden treasure.  At the word ‘treasure’ I saw him pause and listen, but I pretended not to be aware of his presence and rambled on, in a loose, disjointed fashion, about piracies committed by me and the great amount of booty I had secreted.  My plan worked perfectly.  The jailer came to the aperture in the wall and called me to him.  Muttering incoherently, I obeyed.  He asked me what offence brought me there, and I, with a good deal of intentional misunderstanding, told him I was a pirate and a smuggler.  He asked me where the treasure I had been talking about was hidden.  My reply,—­I remember the exact words in which I couched it,—­made him mine completely.  I said:  ’We buried it near Fez—­ Treasure?  I don’t know anything about any treasure.’