After finding that skull, I had hopes of finding the keys of Flushing church, as my father told me that he had seen them at this Captain Hillier’s house; but I was disappointed. He acquired them in this way:--In the Walcheren expedition he was “appointed by Sir Richard Strachan to make the last signal on the island, with strict orders to secure the said signal at the top of the church in a manner it could not be hauled down by the enemy before the rear guard was embarked.” The written instructions were in this box:--“Blake, Flushing Roads, December 23rd 1809. As soon as the day breaks you are to show the two balls on the steeple of Flushing, being the signal for the rear guard to embark and the flotilla to withdraw, and you are to come off with the army.” He did not see how he could stop the enemy hauling the signal down as soon as they reached the church, but he thought he might delay them for some minutes, if he locked up all the doors, and brought the keys away with him. During that war a good many French naval officers were sent to Dartmoor as prisoners; and the gravestones of some of them may be seen in Moreton churchyard, looking strangely out of place there with their French inscriptions. These officers were very popular down here; and I have been told that nobody, however poor, ever claimed the guinea reward that was offered for information of their going out of bounds. In a letter to my father, 9 December 1839, my grandfather says:--“Your account of the French soldiers would not please a Frenchman.... I remember, when staying at Exeter, I saw a whole regiment of young fellows that had been taken prisoners: the eldest did not appear to exceed twenty-one: they were the most ugly and dirty set of fellows I ever saw, and very short: you could scarcely pick such a set from all our regiments.” My father mentions in his diary, Nantes, 19 August 1847, that he had been talking to an old gentleman of over eighty, who had known Nantes since 1789. “In speaking of the horrible revolutionary scenes enacted at Nantes, he said that the most violent fanatics, who carried out the Butcheries and Noyades there, [Illustration: THE AUTHOR’S GRANDFATHER] were chiefly small tradesmen, and continued to live there unmolested after the Restoration as if nothing had happened, and some few were living yet.” Nantes impressed my father very much at that time:--“I have not seen a finer town. It is really finer than Brussels or Frankfort, and, as a whole, even finer than Paris.”