

“Three years of banishment from home and England might make a soldier
and a man of me, my father said, and teach me some degree of wisdom.
 I fought out my long probation in the continental wars, tasting
sumptuously of hard knocks, privation, and adventure; but in my last
battle I was taken captive, and during the seven years that have waxed
and waned since then, a foreign dungeon hath harboured me.