“Well, at last, one day I had the thing finished; when midnight came I trembled like a leaf, till I began to fear I couldn’t carry it through: I tore my shirt and the blanket in strips, to twist into a line, got out the bar by main force, squeezed through, and let myself down. The line was just long enough to let me swing against the cold wall, over a sentry’s head going round the parapet below; as soon as he was past I dropped on the edge of the wall, and fell along it, my fingers scraping the smooth stone to no purpose, till I was sliding off into the dark, with the river I didn’t know how far below me, though I heard it lapping against some boats at the other side. For a few moments I was quite senseless, from the fall into the water; the splash roused the sentinels, and three or four bullets whizzed into it about me, as I struck out for the shore. Still the night was thick enough to help me clear off among the dark lanes in the city;—and the upshot of it was, that I found out some royalists, who supplied me with a pedlar’s dress; till, in the end, after I can’t tell you how many ticklish chances, where my luck hung upon a hair, I reached the coast, and was taken off to a British frigate. At home, sir—at home, I found I’d been given up long ago for a dead man in Bonaparte’s prisons, and—and—the old man had been buried seven years, Aldridge—but not so long as my—wife. The news of my taking my own life in the Temple saved her the rest—’twas too much for her at the time, Aldridge—both she and her little one had lain in the mould nine years, when I stood looking at the grass under Exeter Cathedral! I was a young man almost, still; but my hair was as grizzled when I got out of the Temple in 1813, as you see it now, and I’ll never walk the deck fairly again. Aldridge,” added the captain of the Podargus, turning round and standing still, with a low sort of a deep whisper, “’tis a strange thing, the Almighty’s way of working—but I never thought—in the Temple yonder, longing for a heave of the water under me—I little thought John Wallis would ever come to keep guard over his Majesty, the Emperor Napoleon!”