The den was about twenty-two feet by twenty. The prisoners confined here, all handcuffed, were thirty-four in number. There were Allen, and thirty-one of the thirty-eight men who had surrendered with him at Montreal, the Virginia rifleman taken in the suburb of St. John's, and Dick Wetheral. Until the day before the end of their voyage,--that is to say, for more than a month,--they were not allowed to leave their dark pen, which contained no furniture or utensil other than two tubs. The experience of prison life that Dick had got in Boston was as nothing to that which he now endured, although in accommodating himself to the latter he profited some by the former. Besides the close confinement, the irons, and the perpetual darkness, there was the sickening heaving of the vessel, the continual distress of stomach and adjacent organs, the inevitable fever, and the consequent raging thirst, which each man's daily gill of rum and small allowance of fresh water failed to quench. When the prisoners begged for more water on being served with their regular allowance of salt food, they were jeered and reviled by their keepers, and by the Tories who then looked in at them. They were irritated half to madness by vermin of the body. Some of the men raged, others merely fretted; others lay most of the while in a kind of stupor, at times broken with despairing groans. Allen and Dick both kept their wits, and remained of unbroken spirit. Allen sometimes chafed, but always with a healthy anger, and sometimes he cursed, but more often he declaimed against tyranny, defied the oppressor, and predicted the triumph of liberty. Dick bore the torments of this voyage with a fixed dourness, and, as one annoyance grew upon another, began to see something ludicrous in the very accumulation of miseries, so that his face often went from an irrepressible grimace of inward pain to a peculiar amused smile somewhat akin to that elicited from him on occasions of peril. Moreover, he comforted himself with the thought that, for every dejected moment, fate owed him a moment of exultation, and that the voyage must end some time. One day the prisoners were unexpectedly ordered to go on deck. They stumbled awkwardly up into the light of the sun, and drank in gladly the fresh air of the ocean. Afar in a certain direction, whither all eyes were turned, they beheld a faint blot of duller color against the different blues of sky and sea. It was the Land's End of England. The prisoners, whose faces had become hideously transformed by the growth of beards during their imprisonment, gazed curiously at the first outlines of the land they had never seen, yet once had loved as the home of their fathers.