In connection with the time when Peace was proclaimed and the prisoners were being sent back to France, it is pleasant to have to record an incident greatly to the credit of Selkirk. The pockets of the Frenchmen were naturally, in their situation, not very well filled; indeed, amongst the hundred and ninety they could raise no more than £60, a sum not nearly {269}sufficient to provide transport to the sea port of Berwick for the entire party. They resolved, therefore, to march on foot, using what money they had to hire carriages for the few among them who were in bad health. After an excited night (spent by most of the ex-prisoners in the Market-place, where they shouted and sang till daylight, like a pack of schoolboys), just as they were preparing to set out on their long tramp to Berwick, "an altogether unexpected and pleasant sight met our view," writes M. Doisy. "Vehicles of all kinds came pouring in by the streets converging on the centre of the town, carriages, gigs, tilburys, carts, and a few saddle-horses, all of which had been sent by the inhabitants of the surrounding parts to convey us free of expense as far as Kelso, about half-way to Berwick. This delicate attention had been so well calculated, and so neatly accomplished, that we could not do otherwise than avail ourselves of it with many thanks. We therefore separated from our Selkirk friends without carrying away on the one part or the other any particle of grudge that might previously have existed between us." Similar good feeling, however, appears to have been very general between the French prisoners and the people of the many Border towns where the former were quartered--though it was almost too much to expect that no unpleasantnesses should ever occur, when we remember how great a bogie the Emperor Napoleon then was to the majority of British people, and how to hate the French was looked on as almost a virtue. "Bless us, and save us, _and keep the French from us_," was a common form of invocation, then and later. Persons more ignorant or prejudiced than their neighbours were sure, sooner or later, to overstep the mark, and bring disgrace on their nation by boorish or brutal conduct to the defenceless prisoners. Thus, at Jedburgh for instance, not only did schoolboys sometimes jeer at and stone the Frenchmen, but one bitter old man, who no doubt thought that in hating the French he was only carrying out a manifest duty, actually {270}pointed his gun at, and threatened to shoot, a prisoner whom he found outside the mile limit. A very regrettable incident occurred, too, in the same town during rejoicings over a great British victory. An effigy of the Emperor, mounted on a donkey, was paraded by torchlight through the streets and was then publicly burned, in full view of the deeply-pained French officers. Whatever the faults of the Emperor, he was at least adored by his army, and such instances of brutal ill manners were bound to lead to bad blood and to reprisals.