.... Philammon, seated, looked him calmly in the face .... The old
warrior's eye caught the bank, which was now receding rapidly past
them; and when he saw that they were really floating downwards
again, without an effort to stem the stream, he put away his bill,
and sat himself down deliberately in his place, astonishing the
onlookers quite as much as Philammon had done.

'Five minutes' good fighting, and no one killed! This is a shame!'
quoth another. 'Blood we must see, and it had better be yours,
master monk, than your betters','--and therewith he rushed on poor
Philammon.

He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had been
awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not
frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous
cruelty of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon
over on his back, deliberated by what death he should die.

Philammon quietly submitted--if submission have anything to do with
that state of mind in which sheer astonishment and novelty have
broken up all the custom of man's nature, till the strangest deeds
and sufferings are taken as matters of course. His sudden escape
from the Laura, the new world of thought and action into which he
had been plunged, the new companions with whom he had fallen in, had
driven him utterly from his moorings, and now anything and
everything might happen to him. He who had promised never to look
upon woman found himself, by circumstances over which he had no
control, amid a boatful of the most objectionable species of that
most objectionable genus--and the utterly worst having happened,
everything else which happened must be better than the worst. For