Next morning I was roused accordingly, and a long, low, open carriage rattled up to the door, just before day--dawn. Presently the reveille was beaten, and answered by the different posts in the city, and on the ramparts. We drove on, merely showing our passport to the sentries at the different bridges, until we reached the gate, where we had to pun up until the officer on duty appeared, and had scrupulously compared our personal appearance with the written description. All was found correct, and we drove on. It surprised me very much, after having repeatedly heard of the great strength of Hamburgh, to look out on the large mound of green turf that constituted its chief defence. It is all true that there was a deep ditch and glacis beyond; but there was no covered way, and both the scarp and counterscarp were simple earthen embankments; so that, had the ditch been filled up with fascines, there was no wall to face the attacking force after crossing it,--nothing but a green mound, precipitous enough, certainly, and crowned with a low parapet of masonry, and bristling with batteries about half way down, so that the muzzles of the guns were flush with the neighbouring country beyond the ditch. Still there was wanting, to my imagination, the strength of the high perpendicular wall, with its gaping embrasures, and frowning cannon. All this time it never occurred to me, that to breach such a defence as that we looked upon was impossible. You might have plumped your shot into it until you had converted it into an iron mine, but no chasm could have been forced in it by all the artillery in Europe; so battering in a breach was entirely out of the question, and this, in truth, constituted the great strength of the place. We arrived, after an hour’s drive, at the villa belonging to my protector’s family, and walked into a large room, with a comfortable stove, and extensive preparations made for a comfortable breakfast. Presently three young ladies appeared. They were his sisters,--blue-eyed, fair-haired, white-skinned, round-sterned, plump little partridges. “Haben sie gefruhstucht?” said the eldest. “Pas encore,” said he in French, with a smile. “But, sisters, I have brought a stranger here, a young English officer, who was recently captured in the river.” “An English officer!” exclaimed the three ladies, looking at me, a poor, little, dirty midshipman, in my soiled linen, unbrushed shoes, dirty trowsers and jacket, with my little square of white cloth on the collar; and I began to find the eloquent blood mangling in my cheeks, and tingling in my ears; but their kindly feelings got the better of a gentle propensity to laugh, and the youngest said--“Sie sind gerade zu rechter zeit gekommen:” when, finding that her German was Hebrew to me, she tried the other tack “Vous arrivez a propos, le dejeuner est pret.”