One undefeated convict, by name Petit, escaped continually. He was always getting the better of his gaolers. He took a pride in stating precisely the hour at which he would arrive at Toulon and the day upon which he would leave it a free man. The event always came off exactly. Petit, at one time, when recaptured, after escaping from Brest, was lodged in the prison at Abbeville. He at once warned the prison officials that he could not stay in such an unsatisfactory prison. On the next day he had disappeared. He had broken into a room where the linen was kept, climbed several high walls, fell at length into the garden and got out and away, although his two feet were chained together. He got rid of his irons outside the walls, and had the audacity to return and sell them openly in the market place of Abbeville. Opportunity and good luck usually favored escape. Hautdebont was a convict tailor employed in the workshops where the guardians’ uniforms were made up. He caught sight of a new suit hanging on a peg, which he calculated would fit him, and at a moment when the master-tailor’s eye was withdrawn, Hautdebont took down the uniform, put it on and walked out. Unhappily for the fugitive the suit was immediately missed. The foreman tailor raised an alarm, and Hautdebont was quickly caught and sentenced, among other penalties, to lose his place in the tailor’s shop. Excessive bad luck was the portion of the convict who had exactly calculated that, by surmounting the boundary wall at a particular point, he would reach a certain retired and solitary street. All went well till, having surmounted the wall, he lowered himself on the far side to fall straight into a cart, where a guardian was taking his mid-day rest. He awoke and snapped greedily at the hundred francs’ reward which had fallen straight into his hands. Convicts have often to thank their own quick-wittedness and self-possession for succeeding in attempted escape. One convict at Brest, helped by a free workman, who had promised him shelter and a suit of plain clothes, reached the outskirts of the town, where he made up as a laborer, concealed his closely cropped hair under an old hat, borrowed a barrow and a pick and started off for Orleans as if he were in search of a job. His leisurely gait and frequent halts betrayed no feverish desire to get away. The people gave him _bon jour_ as he passed, and the gensdarmes whom he met accepted a pinch of snuff; and he went on his way without interference. He marched thus for a couple of hundred miles, taking by-roads, still wheeling his barrow before him, resting by night in the woods, and at last reaching Orleans in the heart of France, where he found friends, who helped him out of the country.