able--who, the nearer we got to gaol the more authority he
took, and the less he seemed to think of our soldier escort--to allow
her hands to be unbound that she might minister unto me; and also did
she obtain so much grace as for some of the Money belonging unto her,
and which had been seized at the Stag o' Tyne, to be spent in buying of
a bottle of brandy at one of our halting-places, with which she not only
comforted herself and her afflicted Maid, but, mingling it with water,
cooled my parched tongue and bathed my forehead.

Brandy was the only medicament this good soul knew; and more lives she
averred, had been saved by Right Nantz than lost by bad B. W.; but still
brandy was not precisely the kind of physic to give a Patient who before
Sundown was in a Raging Fever. But 'twas all one to the Law; and coming
at last to my journey's end, we were all, the wounded and the whole,
flung into Gaol to answer for it at the 'Sizes.

FOOTNOTE:

[M] See the Statutes at Large. The Black Act was repealed mainly
through the exertions of Sir James Macintosh, early in the present
century. Under its clauses the going about "disguised or blackened in
pursuit of game" was made felony without benefit of clergy; the
punishment thereof death.--ED.

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

I AM VERY NEAR BEING HANGED.

OUR prison was surely the most loathsome hole that Human beings were
ever immured in. It was a Horrible and Shameful Place, conspicuous for
such even in those days, when every prison was a place of Horror and
Shame. 'Twas one of the King's Prisons,--one of His Majesty's
Gaols,--the county had nothing to do with it; and the Keeper thereof was
a Woman. Say a Tigress rather; but Mrs. Macphilader wore a hoop and
lappets and gold ear-rings, and was dubbed "Madam" by her Underlings.
Here you might at any time have seen poor Wretches chained to the floor
of reeking dungeons, their arms, legs, necks even, laden with irons,
themselves abused, beaten, jeered at, drenched with pailfuls of foul
water, and more than three-quarter starved, merely for not being able to
pay Garnish to the Gaoleress, or comply with other her exorbitant
demands. Fetters, indeed, were common and Fashionable Wear in the Gaol.
'Twas pleaded that the walls of the prison were so rotten through age,
and the means of guarding the prisoners--for they could not be always
calling in the Grenadiers--so limited, that they must needs put the poor
creatures in the bilboes, or r