Shipwrecked; captive among savages; looking down the craters of volcanoes; hanging about all the courts of Europe; fighting Turks, Indians, lions, elephants, alligators, and what not?
At five-and-thirty he had seen enough for three lives, and knew how to make the best of what he had seen.
He had shared, as a lad, in the horrors of the memorable siege of Famagusta, and had escaped, he hardly knew himself how, from the hands of the victorious Turks, and from the certainty (if he escaped being flayed alive or impaled, as most of the captive officers were) of ending his life as a Janissary at the Sultan's court.

He had been at the Battle of the Three Kings; had seen Stukely borne down by a hundred lances, unconquered even in death; and had held upon his knee the head of the dying King of Portugal.
And now, as he said to Rose one evening, what had he left on earth, but a heart trampled as hard as the pavement?
Whom had he to love?
Who loved him?
He had nothing for which to live but fame: and even that was denied to him, a prisoner in a foreign land.
Had he no kindred, then?
asked pitying Rose.
"My two sisters are in a convent;--they had neither money nor beauty; so they are dead to me.

My brother is a Jesuit, so he is dead to me.

My father fell by the hands of Indians in Mexico; my mother, a penniless widow, is companion, duenna--whatsoever they may choose to call it--carrying fans and lapdogs for some princess or other there in Seville, of no better blood than herself; and I--devil! I have lost even my sword--and so fares the house of De Soto." Don Guzman, of course, intended to be pitied, and pitied he was accordingly.

And then he would turn the conversation, and begin telling Italian stories, after the Italian fashion, according to his auditory: the pathetic ones when Rose was present, the racy ones when she was absent; so that Rose had wept over the sorrows of Juliet and Desdemona, and over many another moving tale, long before they were ever enacted on an English stage, and the ribs of the Bideford worthies had shaken to many a jest which Cinthio and Bandello's ghosts must come and make for themselves over again if they wish them to be remembered, for I shall lend them no shove toward immortality.
And so on, and so on.