ithout sleep and a journey
of seventy leagues on horseback, retired to his cabin and went to sleep.

D'Artagnan, overcoming his repugnance to Mordaunt, walked with him upon
the deck and invented a hundred stories to make him talk.

Mousqueton was seasick.

55. The Scotchman.

And now our readers must leave the Standard to sail peaceably, not
toward London, where D'Artagnan and Porthos believed they were going,
but to Durham, whither Mordaunt had been ordered to repair by the letter
he had received during his sojourn at Boulogne, and accompany us to the
royalist camp, on this side of the Tyne, near Newcastle.

There, placed between two rivers on the borders of Scotland, but still
on English soil, the tents of a little army extended. It was midnight.
Some Highlanders were listlessly keeping watch. The moon, which was
partially obscured by heavy clouds, now and then lit up the muskets of
the sentinels, or silvered the walls, the roofs, and the spires of the
town that Charles I. had just surrendered to the parliamentary troops,
whilst Oxford and Newark still held out for him in the hopes of coming
to some arrangement.

At one of the extremities of the camp, near an immense tent, in which
the Scottish officers were holding a kind of council, presided over by
Lord Leven, their commander, a man attired as a cavalier lay sleeping on
the turf, his right hand extended over his sword.

About fifty paces off, another man, also appareled as a cavalier, was
talking to a Scotch sentinel, and, though a foreigner, he seemed to
understand without much difficulty the answers given in the broad
Perthshire dialect.

As the town clock of Newcastle struck one the sleeper awoke, and with
all the gestures of a man rousing himself out of deep sleep he looked
attentively about him; perceiving that he was alone he rose and making
a little circuit passed close to the cavalier who was speaking to the
sentinel. The former had no doubt finished his questions, for a moment
later he said good-night and carelessly followed the same path taken by
the first cavalier.

In the shadow of a tent the former was awaiting him.

"Well, my dear friend?" said he, in as pure French as has ever been
uttered between Rouen and Tours.

"Well, my friend, there is not a moment to lose; we must let the king
know immediately."

"Why, what is the matter?"

"It would take too long to tell you, besides, you will hear it all
directly and the least word