"To say nothing," writes Father Gerard, "of the curious discrepancies as to the date of the warning, it is clearly impossible to determine the locality of Guy's arrest. The account officially published in the 'King's Book,' says that this took place in the street. The letter to the ambassadors assigns it to the cellar and afterwards to the street; that to Parry to the cellar only. Fawkes himself, in his confession of November 5, says that he was apprehended neither in the street nor in the cellar, but in his own room in the adjoining house. Chamberlain writes to Carleton, November 7, that it was in the cellar. Howes, in his continuation of Stowes' _Annals_, describes two arrests of Fawkes, one in the street, the other in his own chamber. This point, though seemingly somewhat trivial, has been invested with much importance. According to a time-honoured story, the baffled desperado roundly declared that had he been within reach of the powder when his captors appeared, he would have applied a match and involved them in his own destruction."[210] This passage deserves to be studied, if only as a good example of the way in which historical investigation ought not to be conducted, that is to say, by reading into the evidence what, according to preconception of the inquirer, he thinks ought to be there, but is not there at all. In plain language, the words 'cellar' and 'street' are not mentioned in any one of the documents cited by Father Gerard. There is no doubt a discrepancy, but it is not one between these two localities. The statements quoted by Father Gerard in favour of a capture in the 'cellar' merely say that it was effected 'in the place.' The letter of the 9th says 'in the place itself,'[211] and this is copied from the draft of the 6th. Chamberlain says[212] that Fawkes was 'taken making his trains at midnight,' but does not say where. Is it necessary to interpret this as meaning the 'cellar'? There was, as we know, a door out of the 'cellar' into the passage, and probably a door opposite into Percy's house. If Fawkes were arrested in this passage as he was coming out of the cellar and going into the house, or even if he had come out of the passage into the head of the court, he might very well be said to have been arrested 'in the place itself,' in contradistinction to a place a few streets off. The only real difficulty is how to reconcile this account of the arrest, with Fawkes's own statement on his first examination on November 5, when he said:-- "That he meant to have fired the same by a match, and saith that he had touchwood and a match also, about eight or nine inches long, about him, and when they came to apprehend him he threw the touchwood and match out of the window in his chamber near the Parliament House towards the waterside."