To keep to my story, though—­which is about Abe Cummins and Billy Bosistow.  It was just in these unhappy conditions that the difference in the two men came out.  Abe took his downfall very quiet from the first.  He had managed to keep a book in his pocket—­a book of voyages it was—­and carry it with him all the way from Dieppe, and it really didn’t seem to matter to him that he was shut up, so long as he could sit in a corner and read about other folks travelling.  In the second year of their captivity an English clergyman, a Mr. Wolfe, came to Jivvy, and got leave from the Commandant to fit up part of the prison granary for a place of worship and preach to the prisoners.  It had a good effect on the men in general, and Abe in particular turned very religious.  Mr. Wolfe took a fancy to him, and lent him an old book on “Navigation”—­Hamilton Moore’s; and over that Abe would sit by the hour, with his room-mates drunk and fighting round him, and copy out tables and work out sums.  All his money went in pen and ink instead of the liquor which the jailors smuggled in.

Billy Bosistow was a very different pair of shoes.  Although no drinker by habit, he fretted and wore himself down at times to a lowness of spirits in which nothing seemed to serve him but drinking, and fierce drinking.  On his better days he was everybody’s favourite; but when the mood fell on him he grew teasy as a bear with a sore head, and fit to set his right hand quarrelling with his left.  Then came the drinking fit, and he’d wake out of that like a man dazed, sitting in a corner and brooding for days together.  What he brooded on, of course, was means of escape.  At first, like every other prisoner in Jivvy, he had kept himself cheerful with hopes of exchange, but it seemed the folks home in Ardevora had given up trying for a release, or else letters never reached them.  And yet they must have known something of the case their poor kinsmen were in, for in the second year the Commandant sent for Abe and Billy, and informed them that, by the kindness of a young English lady, a Miss Selina Johns, their allowance was increased by two sols a day.  He showed them no letter, but the increase was paid regularly for eight months; after which a new Commandant came, and it ceased.  They could never find out if the supply ceased, or into whose pocket it went if it came.

From that time Bosistow had two things to brood upon—­escape and Selina.  But confinement is the ruination of some natures, and as year after year went by and his wits broke themselves on a stone wall, he grew into a very different man from the handy lad the Johnnies had taken prisoner.  One thing he never gave up, and that was his pluck; and he had plenty of use for it when, after seven years, his chance came.