angrily delivered.  Utterly at a loss what to do, I wrote at once to Kossuth that the person wanted was not at the address indicated.  Instead of writing to him to find me and giving him my address, Kossuth only reiterated through the post the former instructions.  I repeated the denial, and then waited.  In conversation with the hotel people I inquired as fully as was possible without exciting suspicion, about persons of liberal tendencies and such as I conceived that I might make use of, and studied the position as best I could.  Pending this study I was summoned to the police headquarters to give an account of myself.  This I did in a manner which must have been satisfactory, as they found that I knew little German and was a very stupid and unpractical individual, which I must have really been, to find myself there.  I accounted for myself as a landscape painter on his travels, and as I knew nobody and made no acquaintances they dismissed all suspicion of me, our consul’s assurance no doubt covering all doubts, and I waited still.  But after a few days more a convenient attack of illness gave me a pretext for calling a physician, and I chose Dr. Orzovensky, who I had learned had been chief of the medical staff under the revolutionary authorities.  Through him I made such inquiries as were possible about the people to whom I was sent, and then for the first time discovered that they were all under accusation as conspirators and searched for by the police, and of this I had no warning from Kossuth.

But in all this wandering my boot-heel was wearing away, and it was a question of wearing into the packet of dispatches, or putting them in a place of security.  I accordingly dug them out, and, hiding them in a convenient corner of the cupboard in my room, where they must soon have been discovered in case of a domiciliary visit, took the excavated boots out to throw them into the river, choosing the earliest darkness of the rainy evening of the same day.  I knew that if the bootblack saw the excavated heel he would in all probability report the fact, and my arrest would follow.  In my ignorance of the fact that the city was under martial law, and that without a pass no one could be in the streets after 8 P.M., I had waited till 9 to be screened by the darkness, and then, walking down the river on the dike, I slipped down to the water’s edge by the path, and gently tossed the boots into the rapid current.  Seeing the dangerous articles float away into the dark, I turned to go up the dike to the road running along the top of it, when, to my dismay, I heard a sentinel directly across the road challenge, saw the officer of the guard coming on his rounds, and heard his reply to the challenge.  I hurried down the bank, hoping that I had not attracted attention, but feeling that in the contrary case I was in most imminent danger of arrest, and the thought of the dispatches left where they must be found in case of suspicion gave me a moment’s anxiety.  I hurried back along the water’s edge till I judged that I was out of sight from the post, and then walked up on the dike and towards the hotel.