sent me down to the ranks with a pair of bloody shoulders. Yet it was necessary to have the witness. I hesitated many months. At one time I had given the thing up. I dreamt twenty times, I daresay, of my papers being discovered, and of my being tried and flogged half to death. At last, however, some fresh act of injustice toward us made me set all danger at defiance. I opened my project to a corporal, whose name was _William Bestland_, who wrote in the office under me, who was a very honest fellow, who was very much bound to me for my goodness to him, and who was, with the sole exception of myself, the only sober man in the whole regiment. To work we went, and during a long winter, while the rest were boozing and snoring, we gutted no small part of the regimental books, rolls, and other documents. Our way was this: to take a copy, sign it with our names, and clap the regimental seal to it, so that we might be able to swear to it when produced in court. All these papers were put into a little box, which I myself had made for the purpose. When we came to Portsmouth there was a talk of searching all the boxes, &c., which gave us great alarm, and induced us to take out all the papers, put them in a bag, and trust them to a custom-house officer, who conveyed them on shore to his own house, whence I removed them in a few days after. “Thus prepared, I went to London, and on the 14th of January, 1792, I wrote to the then Secretary at War, Sir George Yonge, stating my situation, my business with him, and my intentions; enclosing him a letter or petition from myself to the King, stating the substance of all the complaints I had to make; and which letter I requested Sir George Yonge to lay before the King. I waited from the 14th to the 24th of January without receiving any answer at all, and then all I heard was that he wished to see me at the War-office. At the War-office I was shown into an antechamber amongst numerous anxious-looking men, who, every time the door which led to the great man was opened, turned their eyes that way with a motion as regular and as uniform as if they had been drilled to it. These people eyed me from head to foot, and I never shall forget their look, when they saw that I was admitted into paradise, without being detained a single minute in purgatory. Sir George Yonge _heard my story_; and that was apparently all he wanted of me. I was to hear from him again _in a day or two_, and after waiting for _fifteen days_, without hearing from him or any one else upon the subject, I wrote to him again, reminding him that I had from the first told him that I had _no other business in London_; that my stock of money was necessarily scanty; and that to detain me in London was to ruin me. Indeed, I had in