When Captain Barecolt, therefore, returned to the charge, and required a detail of all his adventures, Falgate gave him such an account as was perfectly satisfactory to his interrogator, and which, moreover, had the advantage of being true, though that very important item in the Old Bailey oath, "the whole truth," was not exactly stated. He related how he had been carried off by the Roundhead party; how he had been questioned touching the gentleman with whom he had been lately consorting; how he had refused stoutly to answer, and had been threatened with death; how he had been shut up in the old church, and left there under a guard. There, however, the minute exactitude of the painter's statement halted, and he merely added, that finding the door leading from the church into the vaults open, he had escaped by that means of exit; and, after hiding for some time in the neighbourhood, had heard that the troop which had taken him had been sent to Boston, upon which he ventured to return to Hull. For his faithful discretion Captain Barecolt bestowed upon him high commendation, declared that some day he would be a great man if he would but learn to ride, and offered to be himself his instructor in that elegant art. By the time that the praises of the worthy officer came to an end, however, they were approaching the out-of-the-way spot at which the dwelling of Mr. O'Donnell was situated; but in attempting to approach the water-side they were turned back by a sentinel, who, on being asked how they were to get to the house they wanted to visit, replied, they must go to the back-door if it had one. Luckily, Diggory Falgate was acquainted with the street in which that back-door was situated, and to it they accordingly went, pulled the ring of a bell, and produced the slow appearance of the tidy old woman whom Barecolt had seen before. In reply to his inquiries for Mr. O'Donnell, however, on this occasion, she asserted boldly that he was out; but the worthy captain, whose senses, as the reader knows, were generally on the alert, finished the sentence for her by saying-- "Out of tobacco, do you mean, madam? Good faith! if he smokes away at the rate he is now doing in the parlour, he may well consume a quintal in a short space. Go in, my good lady, and tell him that a gentleman is here who bears him news of old Sergeant Neil's grand-daughter." The poor woman was confounded at the worthy captain's quickness; and, too well accustomed to the vapour of tobacco to smell it herself, could not divine how the visiter had discovered that her master was smoking in the parlour, unless he had looked through a crack in the window. Without more ado, then, she retreated, leaving the strangers in possession of the passage; and in a moment after Mr. O'Donnell's head was thrust out of a door at the farther end, taking a view of his two visiters.