He knew it would not be safe for him to enter the town, and, therefore, as the horse presently calmed of its own accord, Dick dismounted, gave the animal a smart slap to make it proceed on its way, and hastened down towards some fishermen's squat houses that lay near the beach on the outskirts of Falmouth. Noticing several boats drawn up on the sands, Dick knocked at the first door in his way, and brought forth an old woman, who, on his asking how he might get some one to row him across the bay, turned out to be half blind, half deaf, and stupidly indifferent. While he was making his desires clearer to her, he heard an ominous boom from the castle. He knew this to be the alarm-gun, and looked to see what would be its effect on the old woman, but her unaltered features proved the genuineness of her deafness. At last Dick elicited that all the able-bodied men of the hamlet were in the town, at some merrymaking, but that she could hire a boat to him, which he might row himself, and which, as he said he would not soon return that way, he might leave in the care of a certain fisherman at St. Mawes. Dick paid her out of what money he had kept ever since leaving Arnold's camp, and she thereupon helped him drag a small boat out into the waves, and steadied it for him while he clambered aboard. His first attempts at rowing were wild efforts, for this bay of the ocean was as different a matter from the smooth Pennsylvania rivers and creeks, as oars were different from canoe paddles. But difficult arts are soon acquired when they have to be, and by those who will admit nothing to be impossible to themselves that is possible to any other. Dick at last contrived to make some kind of headway, thanks to the serenity of the weather and to the favoring tide. By the time, therefore, when the guards from the castle passed the fishing hamlet, on the track of the horse, Dick was merely an unrecognizable boatman well out in the bay. The trip to St. Mawes, a small matter to a practised waterman, was to Dick one of great persistence and several hours, by reason of his inexperience, through which he covered twice or thrice the distance to be traversed. It was dusk when, at last, after many a dubious look at the castle of St. Mawes that crowned the overlooking hill, he felt the boat grate violently underneath, sounded with his oar, leaped out into the water, and dragged the boat up the beach, now aided and now impeded by the inrolling and receding waves.