He'll be the one who goes to the wall when it's needed.

One evening […] we were on a sudden, greatly astonished, by hearing a violent knocking on the outward Door of our rustic Cot.

[The biography] also displays a rather wearing fidelity to chronology that gives rise to too many summer holidays at the beginning of the book and too many royalty statements towards the end.

The Spanish mission in America soon became not so much crusade as apocalypse.