The average number of prisoners was about 100: they were mostly soldiers, and not sailors, on account of the proximity of Dumfries to the sea. I cannot refrain from adding to the frequent testimonies I have quoted as illustrating the good understanding which existed between captors and captives in Scotland, the following extract from a Farewell Letter which appeared in the _Dumfries Courier_, April 26, 1814, contributed by Lieutenant De Montaignac of the ‘Parisian Guard’. ‘I should indeed be very ungrateful were I to leave this country without publicly expressing my gratitude to the inhabitants of Dumfries. From the moment of my arrival in Scotland, the vexations indispensable in the situation of a prisoner have disappeared before me. I have been two years and five months in this town, prisoner on my parole of honour; and it is with the most lively emotion that I quit a place where I have found so many alleviations to my melancholy situation. I must express my thanks to the generous proceedings with which I have been loaded by the most part of the inhabitants of Dumfries during my captivity, proceedings which cannot but give an advantageous opinion of the Scottish nation. I will add that the respectable magistrates of this town have constantly given proofs of their generous dispositions to mitigate the situation of the prisoners; and that our worthy Agent, Mr. Shortt, has always softened our lot by the delicate manner in which he fulfilled the duty of his functions. It is then with a remembrance full of gratitude, esteem, and consideration for the honest inhabitants of Dumfries, that I quit the charming banks of the Nith to return to the capital of France, my beloved country, from which I have been absent seven years.’ For the following romantic incidents I am indebted to Mr. William McDowell’s _Memorials of St. Michael’s, Dumfries_. Polly Stewart, the object of one of Burns’s minor poems, married a Dumfries prisoner of war. She lived at Maxwelltown, and her father was a close friend of Burns. A handsome young Swiss prisoner, Fleitz by name, loved her and married her, and when Louis XVIII came to the French throne, he, being in the Swiss Guard, took her to France. When Louis Philippe became king, the Swiss body-guard was disbanded, and Mr. and Mrs. Fleitz went to Switzerland. It is said that poor Polly had an unhappy married life, but at any rate nothing was heard of her for thirty years, when she returned to Scotland, and not long after her husband died and she went to a cousin in France. Here her mind gave way, and she was placed in an asylum, where she died in 1847, aged 71. On the tombstone, in St. Michael’s churchyard, of Bailie William Fingass, who died in 1686, is an inscription to a descendant, Anna Grieve, daughter of James Grieve, merchant, who died in 1813, aged 19, with the following lines subjoined: