And, lastly, Gaut Gurley, whose infernal scheming and revolting atrocities have been so inseparably interwoven with the main incidents of our story, broke jail, on the night preceding the day set for his final trial, by digging through the thick stone wall of his prison, with implements evidently furnished from without, leaving bloody traces of his difficult egress through the hardly sufficient hole he had effected for the purpose; and, though instant search was everywhere made for him, he was not, to the sad disappointment of the thousands intending to be in at the hanging, anywhere to be found or heard of in the country. And the mystery of his retreat, and the still unexplained mystery of his strange and ruinous influence over the man whom he at last so flagitiously murdered, were not cleared up until years afterwards. FOOTNOTES: [5] See Christie’s History of Lower Canada. SEQUEL. It was a terrible storm. The wind, with all the awful accompaniments of rain, hail, rattling thunders, and fiercely glaring lightnings, had burst down upon the liquid plains of the startled deep, in all the fury of a tropical tornado. The black heavens were in terrific commotion above; and the smitten and resilient waters, as if to escape the impending wrath of the aroused sister elements, were fleeing in galloping mountains athwart the surface of the boiling ocean beneath. Could aught human, or aught of human construction, be here, now, and survive? It would seem an utter impossibility; and yet it was so. Amidst all this deafening din of battling elements, that were filling the heavens with their uproar and lashing the darkened ocean into wild fury and commotion, a staunch-built West India merchant-ship was seen, now madly plunging into the troughs of the sea, and now quivering like a feather on the towering waves, or scudding through the flying spray with fearful velocity before the howling blast.