ey found half a dozen ships' companies already there, and
enjoying themselves on this diet; the crew of the _Minerva_ frigate, run
ashore off Cherbourg; the crew of the _Hussar_, wrecked outside Brest;
and--so queerly things fall out in this world--among them a parcel of
poor fellows from Ardevora, taken on board the privateer _Recovery_ of
this port.

To keep to my story, though--which is about Abe Cummins and Billy
Bosistow. It was just in these unhappy conditions that the difference
in the two men came out. Abe took his downfall very quiet from the
first. He had managed to keep a book in his pocket--a book of voyages
it was--and carry it with him all the way from Dieppe, and it really
didn't seem to matter to him that he was shut up, so long as he could
sit in a corner and read about other folks travelling. In the second
year of their captivity an English clergyman, a Mr. Wolfe, came to
Jivvy, and got leave from the Commandant to fit up part of the prison
granary for a place of worship and preach to the prisoners. It had a
good effect on the men in general, and Abe in particular turned very
religious. Mr. Wolfe took a fancy to him, and lent him an old book on
"Navigation"--Hamilton Moore's; and over that Abe would sit by the hour,
with his room-mates drunk and fighting round him, and copy out tables
and work out sums. All his money went in pen and ink instead of the
liquor which the jailors smuggled in.

Billy Bosistow was a very different pair of shoes. Although no drinker
by habit, he fretted and wore himself down at times to a lowness of
spirits in which nothing seemed to serve him but drinking, and fierce
drinking. On his better days he was everybody's favourite; but when the
mood fell on him he grew teasy as a bear with a sore head, and fit to
set his right hand quarrelling with his left. Then came the drinking
fit, and he'd wake out of that like a man dazed, sitting in a corner and
brooding for days together. What he brooded on, of course, was means of
escape. At first, like every other prisoner in Jivvy, he had kept
himself cheerful with hopes of exchange, but it seemed the folks home in
Ardevora had given up trying for a release, or else letters never
reached them. And yet they must have known something of the case their
poor kinsmen were in, for in the second year the Commandant sent for Abe
and Billy, and informed them that, by the kindness of a young English
lady, a Miss Selina Johns, their a