Such a testimony is well calculated to excite the curiosity of an interested reader, especially as the two or three incidents mentioned only serve to whet the appetite for more of the like description. The little volume to which he refers has been for some years in the possession of the author of this volume. It is indeed an astonishing book; its alleged likeness to Defoe’s charmingly various style of recital of adventures by sea and by land is no exaggeration, whilst as a piece of real biography it may claim, and quite sustain, a place side by side with the romantic and adventurous career of John Newton; but the wild wonderfulness of the story of Silas seems to leave Newton’s in the shade. Like Newton, Told was also a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, and a believer, in special providences; and well might he believe in such who was led certainly along as singular a path as any mortal could tread. The only other memorial besides his own which has, we believe, been penned of him—a brief recapitulations-well describes him as honest, simple, and tender. Silas Told accompanied, in that awful day, numbers of persons to the gallows, and attempted to console sufferers and victims in circumstances of most harrowing and tragic solemnity: he certainly furnished comfortable help and light when no others were willing or able to sympathise or to help. John Wesley loved him, and when Silas died he buried him, and says of him in his _Journal_: “On the 20th of December, 1778, I buried what was mortal of honest Silas Told. For many years he attended the malefactors in Newgate without fee or reward; and I suppose no man, for this hundred years, has been so successful in that melancholy office. God had given him peculiar talents for it, and he had amazing success therein; the greatest part of those whom he attended died in peace, and many of them in the triumph of faith.” Such was Silas Told. But before we come to those characteristic circumstances to which Wesley refers, we must follow him through some of the wild scenes of his sailor life. He was born in Bristol in 1711; his parents were respectable and creditable people, but of somewhat faded families. His grandfather had been an eminent physician in Bunhill Row, London; his mother was from Exeter. * * *