“On 20th June, when the last draft was being formed, it happened that one unfortunate man could not produce his bedding; probably it had been stolen by others to make up their complement. On being refused at the gate, he rushed frantically back into his prison to look for it, and then, fearful of being left behind, he ran back to the gate to plead his cause with the guard. On being again refused he became frantic with grief, and crying that he had been eleven years in prison, in an agony of despair he pulled out his knife, and there before the guards and his own countrymen cut his throat. There is no more sorrowful incident in the history of Dartmoor.” {253b} When the gate closed behind that man who had been left in Norman Cross on the 19th August, it closed for the last time on a prisoner. The campaign of a hundred days which followed between the escape of Napoleon from Elba and his final defeat at Waterloo sent no prisoners to the Depot, and in 1816 the buildings were demolished and the site sold. The sale, including that of the remaining stores, furniture, and fixtures, occupied thirteen days and realised only £11,060 4_s._ 4_d._ {254} [Picture: One of the Wells on the Site of the Prison. From a photograph by the Rev. E. H. Brown, July 1910] In Peterborough, Stilton, and the neighbouring villages much of the material sold was re-erected and is still in use; but on the site itself, the houses of the barrack master, the agent, and the steward, the wells, the wide fosse which ran round inside the outer wall, and about 60 yards of the wall itself, alone remain of that Norman Cross Prison which, for twenty years in the most eventful period in the history of Europe, played so important a part; over which, and its inmates, the two Governments, French and English, argued and fought, while the prisoners suffered. That prison, where these victims of war—our foemen, it is true, but patriots, and foemen worthy of our steel—pined in prolonged confinement, surrounded by prison walls, held down by cannon, muskets, and bayonets, hoping for release which never came, enduring an agonising longing for freedom—a longing so keen that many of them purchased it by enlisting in the ranks of Britain, their country’s enemy—and suffering, alas! other miseries, of which not the least was the moral deterioration and degradation consequent on their condition and surroundings. Gone are the prisons and their miseries, gone the barracks and their busy life of active duties, and gone, also, all personal recollection of the great events of 1789 to 1816, of which the life here was a part.