Many a man drew has last breath with his last stroke, and was at the
first leisure moment hurled into the waves. It was the description
that had so deeply moved Friedel long ago, and Christina wept over
it, as she looked at the bowed form once so proud and free, and
thought of the unhealed scars. But there, her husband added, he had
been chained next to a holy friar of German blood, like himself a
captive of the great Styrian raid; and, while some blasphemed in
their misery, or wildly chid their patron saints, this good man
strove to show that all was to work out good; he had a pious saying
for all that befell, and adored the will of God in thus purifying
him; "And, if it were thus with a saint like him, I thought, what
must it be with a rough freebooting godless sinner such as I had
been? See"--and he took out a rosary of strung bladders of seaweed;
"that is what he left me when he died, and what I meant to have been
telling for ever up in the hermitage."
"He died, then?"
"Ay--he died on the shore of Corsica, while most of the dogs were off
harrying a village inland, and we had a sort of respite, or I trow he
would have rowed till his last gasp.
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