The next day, or the day after, the Captain and the Bishop walked out of the Prison. When they were gone open talk went round the Prison, perhaps started by the Poet, that one was a highwayman and the other a sharper--perhaps a forger--a contriver of plots and plans to deceive the unwary. I marvelled that they should have received the bounty of so fine a lady, for indeed, whether highwayman or sharper or honest men, they were as foul-mouthed a pair of reprobates--drunken withal--as we had in the prison. And then I remembered, suddenly, the reason why I recognised the lady's voice and why there was something in the face also that I seemed to know. I had been but once in my life to the Theatre. On that occasion there was an actress whose beauty and vivacity gave me the greatest possible delight. One may perhaps forget the face of an actress playing a part, because she alters her face with every part: but her voice, when it is a sweet voice, one remembers. The lady was that actress. I remembered her--and her name. She was Miss Jenny Wilmot of Drury Lane. PART I HOW I GOT INTO THE KING'S BENCH CHAPTER I I AM TURNED OUT INTO THE WORLD In the year 1760 or thereabouts, everybody knew the name of Sir Peter Halliday, Merchant. The House in which Sir Peter was the Senior Partner possessed a fleet of West Indiamen which traded between the Port of London and Jamaica, Barbadoes, and the other English Islands, taking out all kinds of stuffs, weapons, implements, clothing, wine, silks, gloves, and everything else that the planters could want, and returning laden with sugar in bags, mahogany, arrack, and whatever else the islands produce. Our wharf was that which stands next to the Tower stairs: the counting-house was on the wharf: there the clerks worked daily from seven in the morning till eight at night. As a boy it was my delight to go on board the ships when they arrived. There I ran up and down the companion: into the dark lower deck where the midshipmen messed and slept among the flying cockroaches, which buzzed into their faces and the rats which ran over them and the creatures which infest a ship in hot latitudes and come on board with the gunny-bags, such as centipedes, scorpions, and great spiders. And I would stand and watch the barges when they came alongside to receive the cargo. Then with a yeo-heave-oh! and a chantey of the sailors, mostly meaningless, yet pleasant to hear, they tossed the bags of sugar into the barge as if they were loaves of bread, and the casks of rum as if they had been pint pots. Or I would talk to the sailors and hear stories of maroon niggers and how the planters engaged the sailors to go ashore in search of these fierce runaways and shoot them down in the mountains: and stories of shark and barra coota: of hurricanos and islands where men had been put ashore to starve and die miserably: of pirates, of whom there have always been plenty in the Caribbean Sea since that ocean was first discovered.