Another very singular trait made a deep impression on us. Here were these islanders with a narrow strait only separating them from a land bristling with bayonets. The very roar of the artillery at exercise might be almost heard across the gulf, and yet not a soldier was to be seen about! There were neither forts nor bastions. The harbour, so replete with wealth, lay open and unprotected, not even a gunboat or a guardship to defend it! There was an insolence in this security that Santron could not get over, and he muttered a prayer that the day might not be distant that should make them repent it. He was piqued with everything. While on board ship we had agreed together to pass ourselves for Canadians, to avoid all inquiries of the authorities! Heaven help us! The authorities never thought of us. We were free to go or stay as we pleased. Neither police nor passport officers questioned us. We might have been Hoche and Massena for aught they either knew or cared. Not a _mouchard_ tracked us; none even looked after us as we wont. To me this was all very agreeable and reassuring; to my companion it was contumely and insult. All the ingenious fiction he had devised of our birth, parentage, and pursuits, was a fine romance inedited, and he was left to sneer at the self-sufficiency that would not take alarm at the advent of two ragged youths on the quay of Liverpool. ‘If they but knew who we were, Maurice,’ he kept continually muttering as we went along--‘if these fellows only knew whom they had in their town, what a rumpus it would create! How the shops would close! What barricading of doors and windows we should see! What bursts of terror and patriotism! _Par St. Denis_, I have a mind to throw up my cap in the air and cry ‘_Vive la République!_’ just to witness the scene that would follow.’ With all these boastings, it was not very difficult to restrain my friend’s ardour, and to induce him to defer his invasion of England to a more fitting occasion, so that at last he was fain to content himself with a sneering commentary on all around him; and in this amiable spirit we descended into a very dirty cellar to eat our first dinner on shore.