Then, sitting up in bed, he burst into a prolonged roar of laughter.

Really the whole thing was too funny for any man of humour to contemplate without being moved to merriment.

That gaby, Dirk van Goorl; the furiously indignant but helpless Lysbeth; the solemn, fat-headed fools of Netherlanders at the supper, and the fashion in which he had played his own tune on the whole pack of them as though they were the strings of a fiddle--oh! it was delicious.
As the reader by this time may have guessed, Montalvo was not the typical Spaniard of romance, and, indeed, of history.

He was not gloomy and stern; he was not even particularly vengeful or bloodthirsty.

On the contrary, he was a clever and utterly unprincipled man with a sense of humour and a gift of _bonhomie_ which made him popular in all places.
Moreover, he was brave, a good soldier; in a certain sense sympathetic, and, strange to say, no bigot.