indow looking on the roof. With a rope made of their bedclothes they
lowered themselves clean over the ramparts on to the edge of the
precipice over the river; and along this they passed--having no daylight
to make them giddy--and took their way northwards across the fields.

Well, it doesn't come into my tale to tell you what they went through.
Bosistow wrote out an account of it years after, and you shall read it
for yourself. At one place they had to cross a river, and Billy being,
like the most of our fishermen, no swimmer, his mates stuck him on a
hurdle and pushed him over while they swam behind. They steered by the
Pole Star (for, you understand, they could only travel by night) and
also by a fine comet which they guessed to be in the north-west quarter.

You see the difference between these two fellows, and how little
Providence made of it. Back in Jivvy, Abe Cummins was staring at this
same comet out of his prison windows, and doing his sums and thinking of
Selina Johns. And here was Bosistow following it up for freedom--with
the upshot that he made the coast and was taken like a lamb in the
attempt to hire a passage, and marched in irons from one jail to
another, and then clean back the whole length of France, pretty well to
the Mediterranean Sea. And then he was shut up in a prison on the very
top of the Alps [2] and twice as far from home as he had been in Jivvy.
That's a moral against folks in a hurry if ever there was one.

Well, let alone that while he was here he received a free pardon from
the Emperor, which his persecutors took no notice of, he broke out of
prison again, and was caught and brought back half-starving.
And 'twasn't till Christmas of the year 'thirteen that orders came to
march him right away north again, with all the prisoners, to a place in
the Netherlands; and no sooner arrived than away to go again three
hundred and fifty miles west-sou'-west for Tours, on the Loire river.
I've figured it out on the map, and even that is enough to make a man
feel sore in his feet. But what made Bosistow glad at the time, and
vicious after, was that on his way he fell in with a draft of prisoners,
and, among them, with Abe Cummins, who, so to say, had reached the same
place by walking a tenth part of the distance. And, what's more, though
a man couldn't very well get sleek in Jivvy, Abe had kept his bones
filled out somehow, and knew enough navigation by this time to set a
course to the Channe