es came to light, the lonely house in the marshes was entered,
and Hunt was himself seized and conveyed to London under a strong guard.
There he lay in the Marshalsea until, by discovering the names of
certain persons who had used his hiding-places, he was permitted to
ransom his life.

When all was told he was of no further use to the Government. He was
released, and one fine morning in September, '96, he walked out of his
prison a morose and lonely man. Resolute and daring by nature, but
accustomed to live in the open, with the sound of the lark in his ears,
it was only in the solitude of his cell that he had fallen below
himself. Now, under the open sky, he paid the penalty in a load of shame
and remorse. His feet carried him to the Jacobite house of call in
Maiden Lane, whither he had directed his nag to be sent; but on his
arrival at the inn his eye told him that the place was changed. The
ostler, who had been his slave, looked askance at him, the landlord,
once his obedient servant, turned his back. He was no longer Mr. Hunt,
of Romney, but Hunt the Approver, Hunt the Evidence. Flinging down a
crown and a curse he rode desperately out of the yard, and made haste to
leave London behind him.

But in the country it was little better. At inns on the Dover road,
where he had swaggered in old days the hero of a transparent mystery,
and only less admired than the famous Mr. Birkenhead, the Jacobite post,
whom even the Tower failed to confine--at these his reception was now
cold and formal; and presently the man's heart and hopes went forward
and settled hungrily on the two things left to him in this changed
world, his home in the marshes and his girl. His heart cried home! The
slighting looks of men who would have succumbed to a tithe of his
temptations, would not reach him there; there--he had a reason for
believing it--he would still read love and welcome in his child's eyes.

He was so far from having a turn for sentiment that the gibbet at
Dartford, though he had lain down and risen up for weeks under the
shadow of the gallows, caused him no qualms as he passed under it; nor
the man who hung in chains upon it. But when he rode up to the tavern at
the last stage short of Romney and saw Trot Eubank, the Romney
apothecary, loitering before the house, he drove an oath through his
closed teeth.

The man of drugs was too distant to hear it; nevertheless he smiled, and
not pleasantly. The apothecary had red cheeks and a