He could not bear this raking fire: he turned, most imprudently, up a narrow court which was in total darkness; and, then at first to his surprise but almost immediately afterwards to his grave chagrin, he felt a voluminous and exceedingly foul cotton sheet drawn sharply round his throat, twisted, the slack of it thrown over his head, and one end crammed into his mouth for a gag; almost at the same moment his wrists were jerked behind him, a rope whose hardness must have been due to tar was hitched round them with surely excessive violence, putting him to grievous pain, his feet were lifted from under him, he felt several hands grasping his head and shoulders at random, a couple of them seizing his ankles; he was reversed, and in the attitude described at the Home Office as “The Frogs’ March” he felt himself carried for some few yards, and at last reversed again and placed face upwards upon a narrow and hard surface. Through the filthy cotton which still enveloped his face, the disgusting stains of which were dimly apparent to him, he saw the glimmer of a light, and he heard round him language the accent and many of the words of which were so unfamiliar to him that he could make nothing of it. He was incommoded beyond words. Whatever his defects, George Mulross Demaine was not lacking in physical courage; he begged them in a mumble through the gag that covered his mouth, to let him go. There was no direct reply, but only a good deal of whispering, which so far as he could make it out--and much of it was foreign--related to his person rather than to his request. An attempt to move betrayed the fact that some heavy body was seated upon his shins; another attempt to raise the upper half of his body was met by so sharp a reminder upon the side of his head that he thought it better for the moment to lie still. What followed was an examination of his clothes and their contents, which showed his new neighbours to be unacquainted with the sartorial habits of the wealthy. The two slits in his cape were taken for pockets and their emptiness provoked among other comments the shrill curse of a woman. His trouser pockets, wherein it was fondly hoped that metal might lie hid, and wherein he would rather have died than have put anything, similarly drew blank, and to their disgust, of the two little lines on the waistcoat one was a sham and the other contained nothing but a spare stud. However, this contained a small precious stone, and was the immediate object of a pretty severe scuffle. He was next reversed yet a third time without dignity, and in a manner the violence of which was most wounding: but in his tail pocket was nothing but a large new silk handkerchief which went (apparently by custom, for there was no discussion) to the captain of the tribe.