Like some baited bull in the ring, crouched the Patagonian-looking captive, handcuffed as before; the grass of the green trampled, and gored up all about him, both by his own movements and those of the people around.  Except some soldiers and sailors, these seemed mostly townspeople, collected here out of curiosity.  The stranger was outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian, half-Canadian sort of a dress, consisting of a fawn-skin jacket—­the fur outside and hanging in ragged tufts—­a half-rotten, bark-like belt of wampum; aged breeches of sagathy; bedarned worsted stockings to the knee; old moccasins riddled with holes, their metal tags yellow with salt-water rust; a faded red woollen bonnet, not unlike a Russian night-cap, or a portentous, ensanguined full-moon, all soiled, and stuck about with bits of half-rotted straw.  He seemed just broken from the dead leases in David’s outlawed Cave of Adullam.  Unshaven, beard and hair matted, and profuse as a corn-field beaten down by hailstorms, his whole marred aspect was that of some wild beast; but of a royal sort, and unsubdued by the cage.

“Aye, stare, stare!  Though but last night dragged out of a ship’s hold, like a smutty tierce; and this morning out of your littered barracks here, like a murderer; for all that, you may well stare at Ethan Ticonderoga Allen, the unconquered soldier, by ——!  You Turks never saw a Christian before.  Stare on!  I am he, who, when your Lord Howe wanted to bribe a patriot to fall down and worship him by an offer of a major-generalship and five thousand acres of choice land in old Vermont—­(Ha! three-times-three for glorious old Vermont, and my Green-Mountain boys!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!) I am he, I say, who answered your Lord Howe, ’You, you offer our land?  You are like the devil in Scripture, offering all the kingdoms in the world, when the d——­d soul had not a corner-lot on earth!  Stare on!’”

“Look you, rebel, you had best heed how you talk against General Lord Howe,” here said a thin, wasp-waisted, epauletted officer of the castle, coming near and flourishing his sword like a schoolmaster’s ferule.

“General Lord Howe?  Heed how I talk of that toad-hearted king’s lick-spittle of a scarlet poltroon; the vilest wriggler in God’s worm-hole below?  I tell you, that herds of red-haired devils are impatiently snorting to ladle Lord Howe with all his gang (you included) into the seethingest syrups of tophet’s flames!”

At this blast, the wasp-waisted officer was blown backwards as from before the suddenly burst head of a steam-boiler.

Staggering away, with a snapped spine, he muttered something about its being beneath his dignity to bandy further words with a low-lived rebel.

“Come, come, Colonel Allen,” here said a mild-looking man in a sort of clerical undress, “respect the day better than to talk thus of what lies beyond.  Were you to die this hour, or what is more probable, be hung next week at Tower-wharf, you know not what might become, in eternity, of yourself.”