His first contrivance was to change names with an old American in the depot.  It so happened that the captain of a French privateer had applied to the prison for a crew of foreigners to man his ship, then lying at Morlaix.  The trick, by oiling the jailor’s palm, was managed easily enough, and away Bosistow was marched with twenty comrades of all nations.  But at the first stage some recruiting officers stopped them, insisting that they were Irish and not Americans, and must be enlisted to serve with Bonaparty’s army in Spain.  The prisoners to a man refused to hear of it, and the end was they were marched back to prison in disgrace, and, to cap everything, had their English allowance stopped on pretence that they had been in the French service.  Yet this brought him a second chance, for being now declared an Irishman he managed to get himself locked up with the Irish, who had their quarters on the handier side of the prison; and that same night broke out of window with two other fellows, got over the prison wall, and hid in the woods beyond.  But on the second day a party of wood-rangers attacked them with guns and captured them; and back they went, and were condemned to six years in irons.

This, as it turned out, didn’t amount to much; for, while they were waiting to be marched off to the galleys, their jailor came with news that a son was born to the Emperor, and they were pardoned in honour of it.  But instead of putting them back in their old quarters, he fixed them up for a fortnight in a room by themselves, being fearful that such bad characters would contaminate the other prisoners.  This room was an upstairs one in a building on the edge of the ramparts, and after a few nights they broke through the ceiling into an empty chamber, which had a window looking on the roof.  With a rope made of their bedclothes they lowered themselves clean over the ramparts on to the edge of the precipice over the river; and along this they passed—­having no daylight to make them giddy—­and took their way northwards across the fields.

Well, it doesn’t come into my tale to tell you what they went through.  Bosistow wrote out an account of it years after, and you shall read it for yourself.  At one place they had to cross a river, and Billy being, like the most of our fishermen, no swimmer, his mates stuck him on a hurdle and pushed him over while they swam behind.  They steered by the Pole Star (for, you understand, they could only travel by night) and also by a fine comet which they guessed to be in the north-west quarter.

You see the difference between these two fellows, and how little Providence made of it.  Back in Jivvy, Abe Cummins was staring at this same comet out of his prison windows, and doing his sums and thinking of Selina Johns.  And here was Bosistow following it up for freedom—­with the upshot that he made the coast and was taken like a lamb in the attempt to hire a passage, and marched in irons from one jail to another, and then clean back the whole length of France, pretty well to the Mediterranean Sea.  And then he was shut up in a prison on the very top of the Alps [2] and twice as far from home as he had been in Jivvy.  That’s a moral against folks in a hurry if ever there was one.