sh Consul and his old friend, the Quaker; and once more the
prodigal was induced to return to his father's roof.

For a time he proved a model student, to the surprise and delight of his
parents; but once more "hope told a flattering tale." For the third time
he disappeared, and was soon on his way to the Mediterranean as a sailor
working before the mast, and ideally happy in his vagabond life. This
time his father's patience was quite exhausted. He refused to trouble
any more about his prodigal son, declaring that "he had made his bed and
must lie on it."

Mr Foster, however, the rescuer from the fish-basket, was of another
mind. He went in chase of the fugitive, ran him to earth, and brought
him again triumphantly home, submissive but unrepentant. It was quite
clear that the boy would never settle down to the humdrum life of home
and school, and, with his father's permission, Mr Foster took the
restless youth for a long visit to the West Indies, where it seemed that
at last he was cured of his passion for straying. A few years later we
find him back in England, a model of stability, a student and a scholar,
who, in 1747, blossomed into a knight of the shire for the County of
Huntingdon. The rolling-stone had come to rest at last, and had actually
developed into a pillar of the State!

But this eminently respectable chapter in Montagu's chequered life was
destined to be a short one. He soon found himself so uncomfortably deep
in debt that he vanished again--this time to escape from his creditors.
He turned up smiling in Paris, where the sedate legislator blossomed
into the gambler and _roue_, dividing his time between the seductive
poles of the gaming-table and fair women.

His course of dissipation, however, received a sudden and severe check
one Sunday morning in the autumn of 1751, when he was rudely disturbed
by the entry of a _posse_ of officials into his room, armed with a
warrant for his imprisonment.

"On Sunday, the 31st of October 1751," Mr Montagu
records, "when it was near one in the morning, as I was
undressed and going to bed, I heard a person enter my
room; and upon turning round and seeing a man I did not
know, I asked him calmly _what he wanted_? His answer was
that _I must put on my clothes._ I began to expostulate
upon the motive of his apparition, when a commissary
instantly entered the room with a pretty numerous
attendance, and told me with great