I marched for a few paces in silence, mad and degraded; bewildered, too; nay, I may say confounded almost to distraction by the hurry of the astonishing experiences which I had encountered within the last hour. “What ship do you belong to?” I presently said, addressing a big bull-faced man who guarded me on the left. “The frigate out yonder,” he answered in a deep, wary voice; “keep a civil tongue in your head and give no trouble, and what’s wrong will be righted, if wrong there be,” and he looked at me by the light of a second lamp that the company of us was tramping past. “I am mate of the _Royal Brunswicker_ now probably getting her anchor astern of your frigate,” said I. “Cannot I make your officer believe me, for then he might set me aboard?” The fellow on my right rumbled with laughter as though he would choke. We trudged onward, making for that part of the beach upon which King Street opens. Presently one of the pressed men in my wake began to curse; he used horrible language. With frightful imprecations he demanded to know why he should be obliged to fight for a king whose throat he thirsted to cut; why he should be obliged to fight for a nation which he didn’t belong to, whose people he hated; why he was to be converted into a bloody piratical man-of-war’s man, instead of being left to follow the lawful, respectable calling of a merchant seaman---- A mighty thump on the back, that sounded like the blow of a handspike upon a hatch-cover, knocked his hideous speech into a single half-choked growl, and the young gentleman with the refined but husky voice called out: “If that beast doesn’t belay his jaw, stuff his mouth full of shingle and gag him.” I guessed that this gang were satisfied with picking up three men that night, for they looked neither to right nor left for more, and headed on a straight course for their boat. After the ruffian astern of me had been thumped into silence scarce a word was uttered. The sailors seemed weary, as though they had had a long bout of it, and the officer, perhaps, was too sensible of being under the influence of drink to venture to define his state by more words than were absolutely needful. I had heard much of the brutality of the press-gang, of taunts and kicks, of maddening ironic promises of prize money and glory to the miserable wretches torn from their homes or from their ships, of pitiless usage, raw heads, and broken bones. All this I had heard of, but I witnessed nothing of the sort among the men into whose hands I had fallen. In silence we marched along, and the tramp of our feet was returned in a hollow echo from the houses we passed, and the noise, of our tread ran through the length of the feebly lighted street, which the presence of the King’s seamen had desolated as utterly as though the plague had been brought to Deal out of the East, and as though the buildings held nothing but the dead.