If I lived a thousand years, I couldn't tell half what I felt lying there; but, as you may imagine, it had somewhat in it of the late European war by land and sea. Not that I could have said so at the time, but rather a sort of half-doze, such as I've known one have when a schoolboy, lying on the green grass the same way, with one's face turned up into the hot summer heavens: half of it flying glimpses, as it were, of the French Revolution, the battles we used to hear of when we were children--then the fears about the invasion, with the Channel full of British fleets, and Dover Cliffs--Trafalgar and Nelson's death, and the battle of Waterloo, just after we heard _he_ had got out of Elba. In the terrible flash of the thing all together, one almost fancied them all gone like smoke; and for a moment I thought I was falling away off, _down_ into the wide sky, so up I started to sit. From that, suddenly I took to guessing and puzzling closely again how I should go to work myself, if I were the strange Frenchman I saw in the brig at sea, and wanted to manage Napoleon's escape out of St Helena. And first, there was how to get into the island and put _him_ up to the scheme--why, sure enough, I couldn't have laid it down better than they seemed to have done all along: what could one do but just dodge about that latitude under all sorts of false rig, then catch hold of somebody fit to cover one's landing. No Englishman _would_ do it, and no foreigner but would set Sir Hudson Lowe on his guard in a moment. Next we should have to get put on the island,--and really a neat enough plan it was to dog one of the very cruisers themselves, knock up a mess of planks and spars in the night-time, set them all a-blaze with tar, and pretend we were fresh from a craft on fire; when even Captain Wallis of the Podargus, as it happened, was too much of a British seaman not to carry us straight to St Helena! Again, I must say it was a touch beyond me--but to hit the Governor's notions of a hobby, and go picking up plants round Longwood, was a likely enough way to get speech of the prisoner, or at least let him see one was there!