But the vessel being driven by stress of weather into Bridgewater Bay, and Blood's health having grown worse during the voyage, he decided to go ashore there, additionally urged to it by the fact that it was his mother's native soil.
Thus in January of that year 1685 he had come to Bridgewater, possessor of a fortune that was approximately the same as that with which he had originally set out from Dublin eleven years ago.
Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly restored to him, and because he conceived that he had passed through adventures enough for a man's lifetime, he determined to settle there, and take up at last the profession of medicine from which he had, with so little profit, broken away.
That is all his story, or so much of it as matters up to that night, six months later, when the battle of Sedgemoor was fought.
Deeming the impending action no affair of his, as indeed it was not, and indifferent to the activity with which Bridgewater was that night agog, Mr.Blood closed his ears to the sounds of it, and went early to bed.

He was peacefully asleep long before eleven o'clock, at which hour, as you know, Monmouth rode but with his rebel host along the Bristol Road, circuitously to avoid the marshland that lay directly between himself and the Royal Army.

You also know that his numerical advantage--possibly counter-balanced by the greater steadiness of the regular troops on the other side--and the advantages he derived from falling by surprise upon an army that was more or less asleep, were all lost to him by blundering and bad leadership before ever he was at grips with Feversham.
The armies came into collision in the neighbourhood of two o'clock in the morning.

Mr.Blood slept undisturbed through the distant boom of cannon.

Not until four o'clock, when the sun was rising to dispel the last wisps of mist over that stricken field of battle, did he awaken from his tranquil slumbers.
He sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and collected himself.
Blows were thundering upon the door of his house, and a voice was calling incoherently.