Natural sorrow for the loss of his relative, and the native honesty of an American seaman, united to open the heart of the captain to our wanderer, and he agreed to give him a passage in the _Ohio_ to Boston, from whence he could reach Britain more readily than from the coast of France, watched and surrounded as it was by ships and gunboats, troops and gens d'armes, police, spies, passports, &c. Believing all arranged at last, Grant never left the ship, but counted every hour until he should again find himself in Leon, the land of his faithful Juanna, with his comrades of the Black Watch around him, and the eagles of Marmont in front. At last came the important hour, when the anchor of the _Ohio_ was fished; when her white canvas filled, and the stars and stripes of America swelled proudly from her gaff-peak, as she bore down the sun-lit Loire with the evening tide; but now an unlooked-for misfortune took place. A French privateer, the famous _Jean Bart_, ran foul of her, and, by carrying away her bowsprit and foremast, brought down her maintop-mast too. Thus she was forced to run back to Paimboeuff and haul into dock. For our disguised captain of the 42nd Highlanders to remain in the docks, guarded as they were by watchful gens-d'armes, was impossible; thus, on being furnished by the skipper of the _Ohio_ with the coarse clothes of a mariner, and a written character, stating that he was "Nathan Prowse, a native of Nantucket, in want of a ship," he stained his face and hands with tobacco-juice, shaved off his moustache, and repaired to an obscure tavern in the suburbs of Paimboeuff, to find a lodging until an opportunity offered for his escape. Under his peajacket he carried a pair of excellent pistols, which he kept constantly loaded; and a fine dagger or Albacete knife, a gift of poor Domingo de Leon. As he sat in the kitchen of this humble house of entertainment, his eye was caught by a printed placard above the mantelpiece. It bore the imperial arms, with the cipher of the Emperor, and stated that "the notorious spy Colquhoun Grant, a captain in a Scottish regiment of the British army, who had wrought so much mischief behind the lines of le Maréchal Duc de Raguse, in Leon, and who had been brought prisoner to France, where he had broken his parole, was wandering about, maintaining a system of espionage and Protean disguises; that he had, lastly, assumed the name, character, and passport of an American citizen, named Jonathan Buck, whom he had wickedly and feloniously murdered and robbed in the Rue de Rivoli at Paris; that the sum of 2,000 francs was hereby offered for him dead or alive; and that all prefects, officers, civil and military, gens-d'armes, and loyal subjects of the Emperor, by sea and land, were hereby authorized to seize or kill the said Colquhoun Grant wherever and whenever they found him."