As the doctor of the _Vengeance_ predicted, the infection brought by the survivors of Cabrera spread through the ship with terrible severity, and Garneray himself was seized with fever, and was sent on board the _Pegasus_. He tells how by the intervention of a fellow-countryman who was a hospital assistant, he contrived to avoid the horrors of the compulsory cold bath on entrance, and proceeds to relate a circumstance which, horrible as it is, I give for what it is worth. A neighbour invalid had a diamond ring on his finger. He was a soldier of Spain, and the ring no doubt had been obtained, as Garneray says, ‘by the luck of war’. He was very far gone; indeed his death could only be a matter of a few hours. Garneray, rapidly becoming convalescent, heard two English attendants conspire to take the dying man away at once to the mortuary and there to relieve him of his ring. They carried him away; Garneray called for his French friend, and bid him go at once and prevent the brutal deed. He did so, and the man actually recovered, but he told Garneray that it was quite the rule in this crowded hospital ship for patients to be hurried away before they were dead into the mortuary in order to make room for others! Garneray says: ‘It is difficult to give the reader an idea of the barbarous manner in which the French were treated on this hospital ship. I will only give one more instance, for my aim is not to horrify, and there were acts of cruelty which the pen hesitates to describe. One day the English doctor was asked to authorize wine to be given to a young officer, grievously ill, in order to strengthen him. “Are you mad?” replied the doctor. “To dare to ask me to give strength to an enemy? Get out! You must be a fool!”’ When Garneray returned to the _Vengeance_ he had news of the Baron de Bonnefoux—extracts from whose life upon the Chatham hulks have already been given,—and speaks of him as bent upon escaping, and fears he would be shot one of these days. Garneray later is allowed to go on parole to Bishop’s Waltham, about his sojourn at which place something will be said when the story of the Prisoners on Parole comes to be told. Suffice it therefore to say that Garneray got away from Bishop’s Waltham to Portsmouth, and well across the Channel on a smuggling vessel, when he was recaptured by a British cruiser, and once again found himself a prisoner on the _Vengeance_. After more sufferings, brutal treatment, and illness, Garneray was at length made free by the Treaty of Paris in 1814. [Illustration: THE VENGEANCE. (_After Louis Garneray._) ] CHAPTER V LIFE ON THE HULKS—(_continued_)