"You must be a little sleepy, major: however, this fellow, they say, was cotched cheating with cards one day, when he was playing a game of five shilling loo with the King or the Queen, or some of the dukes or colonels in the guards--for he wa'n't above any thing rascally. So, it was buzzed about, as you may suppose when a man goes to cheating one of them big fish--and the King gave him his choice to enlist, or go to the hulks; and he, being no fool, listed, as a matter of course. In that way he got over here; and, as I tell you, was a sort of sarvent to that young Earl. He sometimes came about our quarters to list prisoners and make Tories of 'em, for his own people kept him to do all that sort of dirty work, upon account of the glibness of his tongue. He was a remarkable saucy fellow and got nothing but ill-will from the prisoners--though, I make no doubt, the man is a tolerable sodger on sarvice. Now, after telling you all this, major, you must know that the identical, same, particular man that we saw looking through the porch window at us to-night"-- "Is the man you have been describing? Is it possible? Are you sure of it?" "I knowed him the minute I clapped eyes on him: his name is James Curry: but, as I didn't stay long at Charlestown, and hadn't any thing to do with him in particular, it seems he didn't remember me." "You conversed with him?" "Most sartainly I did. I wanted to gather a little consarning of his visit up here: but the fellow's been so battered about in the wars, that he knows how to hold his tongue. I had some mischief in me, and did want to make him just angry enough to set his speech loose; and, besides, I felt a little against him upon account of his misdoings with our people in Carolina, and so, I said some rough things to him; and, as my discourse ar'n't none of the squarest in pint of grammar and topographical circumlocution--as Lieutenant Hopkins used to say--why he set me down for a piece of an idiot, and began to hoax and bamboozle me. I put that matter straight for him very soon, by just letting him say so much and no more. And then, as I was a peaceable man, major, he seemed to see that I didn't want to have no quarrel with him, which made him push it at me rather too hard, and all my civility ended in my giving him what he wanted at first--a tolerable, regular thrashing." The sergeant continued to relate to Butler the details of this adventure, which he did with more prolixity than the weariness of his listener was able to endure; for the major, having in the progress of the narrative got into bed, and having, in the increasing oscitancy of his faculties, exhausted every expression of assent by which one who listens to a tale is accustomed to notify his attention--he at length dropped into a profound sleep, leaving the sergeant to conclude at his leisure.