service should be upon that element. He had the advantage of a
commission under the famous de Ruyter, and fought in the
Mediterranean engagement in which that great Dutch admiral lost
his life.

After the Peace of Nimeguen his movements are obscure. But we know
that he spent two years in a Spanish prison, though we do not know
how he contrived to get there. It may be due to this that upon his
release he took his sword to France, and saw service with the French
in their warring upon the Spanish Netherlands. Having reached, at
last, the age of thirty-two, his appetite for adventure surfeited,
his health having grown indifferent as the result of a neglected
wound, he was suddenly overwhelmed by homesickness. He took ship
from Nantes with intent to cross to Ireland. But the vessel being
driven by stress of weather into Bridgewater Bay, and Blood's health
having grown worse during the voyage, he decided to go ashore there,
additionally urged to it by the fact that it was his mother's native
soil.

Thus in January of that year 1685 he had come to Bridgewater,
possessor of a fortune that was approximately the same as that with
which he had originally set out from Dublin eleven years ago.

Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly
restored to him, and because he conceived that he had passed
through adventures enough for a man's lifetime, he determined to
settle there, and take up at last the profession of medicine from
which he had, with so little profit, broken away.

That is all his story, or so much of it as matters up to that night,