her we can
surely find some way of getting free."

"Bless your eyes, don't I wish we may. Maybe there's a fate in it,
sir. Fate jined you and me when it made me set Vetch a-rolling in
the barrel, and 'tis fate has jined us all three here. Ay, please
God, sir, one day we'll slip our cables, clap on all canvas, and
steer for the north, though how, whereby, and by what means we can
do it beats Joe Punchard."

The companionship of Joe, at a time when I was weak from my
sickness, mightily cheered me, and we spent much of each day
together. Our longing to be free did but increase as the days
passed. The monotony of prison life fretted us, Joe perhaps less
than me, for his life had been harder than mine, and as the days
grew shorter, and the nipping cold of winter by degrees overtook
us, we began to know what real wretchedness is. By day we could
warm ourselves with exercise and active sports in the courtyard,
but at night we shivered under our thin coverlets, and I found
myself by and by wishing that my bedfellow Runnles had a little
more flesh on his bones, for a lean man is no comfort in bed on a
bitter night. Joe was not in my dormitory, or I should certainly
have bedded with him.

Above everything else, I think, the wretched food made us unhappy.
If a man be but well fed he can endure much hardship and trouble,
and I had never wanted in this respect. The prison food was bad,
ill cooked, and meagre; and though Joe, for one, might have
procured better if he had chosen to employ himself in his old trade
of coopering, he refused to do so after making one barrel, the
price of which, after the soldiers' commission had been deducted,
was something less than a fourth of what it would have been in
England.

"'Noint my block!" he cried, when the pitiful sum was placed in his
hand. "Dost think a Shrewsbury man 'll be done out of his dues by a
codger of a Frenchman what he don't vally no more than pork slush
or a stinking dogfish? Split my binnacle if I be!"

And he flung the money at the amazed Frenchman, and kept his word
to work at his old trade no more.

I think this sturdiness of his raised him somewhat in the
estimation of our jailers, and in spite of the opprobrious epithets
he applied to them (which to be sure they did not understand) he
was soon as popular with them as Vetch was the reverse. Joe was
blessed with a great fund of good humor, which withstood all
privation and restraint. He growled and groaned at being