plan of escape, which (being a facetious fellow) he
announced as follows: 'I wish you good morning, Mr. Buck,' he began.
'Sir,' I answered, 'I have no claim to such a designation. My pleasures
in Paris have been entirely respectable, and I dislike familiarity.'
'Mr. Jonathan Buck, I should have said.' 'Sir,' I corrected him,
'if your clients are so numerous that you confuse their names, I must
remind you that mine is McNeill.' 'Pardon me,' he replied, 'you have
this morning inherited that of an American citizen who died suddenly
last evening in an obscure lodging near the Barriere de Pantin; and, in
addition, a passport now waiting for him at the Foreign Office, if you
have the courage to claim it. You resemble the deceased sufficiently to
answer a passport's description: and if you secure it, I advise a speedy
departure, with Nantes for your objective.' Accordingly, that same
evening I left Paris for the Loire."

"You had the coolness to apply for that passport?"

"And the good fortune to obtain it. If anything, my dear fellow,
deserves the degree of astonishment your face expresses, it should
rather be my consenting to use disguise, and so breaking through a
self-denying ordinance on which you have sometimes rallied me.
Suspense--the danger from Bayonne hourly anticipated--had perhaps shaken
my nerves. To be brief, I travelled to Nantes as Mr. Jonathan Buck, and
in that name took passage in a vessel bound for Philadelphia and on the
point (as I understood) of lifting anchor.

"I slept that night on board the _Minnie Dwight_--this was the vessel's
name--in full hope that my troubles were at an end. But next morning
her captain came to me with a long face and a report that some hitch had
occurred between him and the port authorities over his clearing-papers.
'And how long will this detain us?' I asked, cutting short an
explanation too technical for my understanding. He answered that he had
been to his Consul to protest, but could promise nothing short of a
week's delay.

"Well, I saw nothing for it but to shut the cabin-door, make a clean
breast of my fears, and desire him to help me in devising some new plan.
He was a good fellow, and ingenious too; for after he had dashed up my
hopes with the news that a similar embargo lay on all foreign ships in
the port, his face cleared, and, said he, 'There's no help for it, but
you must play the sea-lawyer and I the brutal tyrant. It's hard, too,
upon a man who tre