In the prison with him lay a Moor, for whose exchange
against a Christian taken by the Sallee pirates an order came
down. It arrived in the evening; the Moor was to be removed in
the morning. An hour after the arrival of the news, however, and
when the two had just been locked up for the night, the Moor,
overcome with excess of joy, suddenly expired. At first the
Spaniard was for giving the alarm; but, being an ingenious
fellow, in a few minutes he summoned all his wits together and
made a plan. Contriving to blacken his face and hands with
charcoal he changed clothes with the corpse, and muffling himself
up after the fashion of the Moors in a cold climate he succeeded
in the early morning in passing out in his place. Those who had
charge of him had no reason to expect an escape, and once on the
road he had little difficulty in getting away, and eventually
reached France after a succession of narrow chances.
All this the man told me so simply that I knew not which to
admire more, the daring of his device--since for a white man to
pass for a brown is beyond the common scope of such disguises--or
his present modesty in relating it.
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