the market-place by the bloodthirsty Colonel Kirke. There was about
the Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might
have disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as
they were, but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which
put an end to the drumhead courts-martial.

Even so, in that first week after Sedgemoor, Kirke and Feversham
contrived between them to put to death over a hundred men after a
trial so summary as to be no trial at all. They required human
freights for the gibbets with which they were planting the
countryside, and they little cared how they procured them or what
innocent lives they took. What, after all, was the life of a clod?
The executioners were kept busy with rope and chopper and cauldrons
of pitch. I spare you the details of that nauseating picture. It
is, after all, with the fate of Peter Blood that we are concerned
rather than with that of the Monmouth rebels.

He survived to be included in one of those melancholy droves of
prisoners who, chained in pairs, were marched from Bridgewater to
Taunton. Those who were too sorely wounded to march were conveyed
in carts, into which they were brutally crowded, their wounds
undressed and festering. Many were fortunate enough to die upon
the way. When Blood insisted upon his right to exercise his art so
as to relieve some of this suffering, he was accounted importunate
and threatened with a flogging. If he had one regret now it was
that he had not been out with Monmouth. That, of course, was
illogical; but you can hardly expect logic from a man in his position.

His chain companion on that dreadful march was the same Jeremy Pitt
who had been the agent of his present misfortunes. The young