“Well, sir, at Paris they clapped me into a long gloomy-like piece of mason-work called the Temple, close alongside of the river, where plenty of our countrymen were; Captain Wright and Sir Sidney Smith himself among the rest, as I found out afterwards. The treatment wasn’t so bad at first; but when you climbed up to the windows, there was nothing to be seen but the top of a wall, and roofs of houses all round, save where you’d a glimpse of the dirty river and some pig-trough of a boat. One day I got a letter from Captain Wright—how they let me have it I don’t well know—saying he was allowed a good deal of comfort in the mean time, but he suspected some devilish scheme in it, to make him betray the British government, or something of the kind; that he’d heard one of the French royalist generals had choked himself in his prison, but never to believe he’d do the same thing, though every night he woke up thinking he heard the key turn in the door. The next thing I heard of was that Captain Wright had made away with himself, sir!” Here Captain Wallis got up again, walking across the cabin, seemingly much moved. “Well, after that I slept with the dinner-knife in my breast, till the jailer took it away; for I thought at the time that poor Wright had been murdered, though I found cause to change my mind when I knew what loneliness does with a man, not to speak of the notion being put before him to take his own life. For a while, too, Captain Shaw was in the same cell; by which time we had such bad food, and so little of it, that one day when a pigeon lighted on the window, which used to come there for a crumb or two every afternoon, right along with the gold gleam of the sun as it shot over the dark houses to that window—I jumped up and caught it. Shaw and I actually tore it in bits, and eat it raw on the spot; though ’twas long ere I could get rid of the notion of the poor bird fluttering and cooing against the bars, and looking at me with its round little soft eye as it pecked off the slab. But what was that to the thought of my old father that had hurt himself to keep me in the navy, and me able, now, to make his last days comfortable—or the innocent young girl I had married the moment I got my commission of first lieutenant, expecting to be flush of prize-money! It even came into my head often, when I sat by myself in the cell they afterwards put me into, alone,—how that little blue pigeon might have carried a letter to England for me—at any rate it was the only thing like a chance, or a friend, I ever saw the whole time I was there,—and foolish as the notion may look, why the window was too high in a smooth wall, for me once to reach it. I heard all Paris humming round the thick of the stone, every day, and sometimes the sound of thousands of soldiers tramping past below, over the next bridge, with music and suchlike—no doubt when the First Consul, as they called him, went off to some campaign or other: then I’d dream I felt the deck under