by Allen.  For, besides the exasperating tendency to self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude.  Nor should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a Botany-Bay convict.  If, at the present day, in any similar case between the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals:  imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its former insulters.

As the event proved, in the course Allen pursued, he was right.  Because, though at first nothing was talked of by his captors, and nothing anticipated by himself, but his ignominious execution, or at the least, prolonged and squalid incarceration, nevertheless, these threats and prospects evaporated, and by his facetious scorn for scorn, under the extremest sufferings, he finally wrung repentant usage from his foes; and in the end, being liberated from his irons, and walking the quarter-deck where before he had been thrust into the hold, was carried back to America, and in due time, at New York, honorably included in a regular exchange of prisoners.

It was not without strange interest that Israel had been an eye-witness of the scenes on the Castle Green.  Neither was this interest abated by the painful necessity of concealing, for the present, from his brave countryman and fellow-mountaineer, the fact of a friend being nigh.  When at last the throng was dismissed, walking towards the town with the rest, he heard that there were some forty or more Americans, privates, confined on the cliff.  Upon this, inventing a pretence, he turned back, loitering around the walls for any chance glimpse of the captives.  Presently, while looking up at a grated embrasure in the tower, he started at a voice from it familiarly hailing him: 

“Potter, is that you?  In God’s name how came you here?”

At these words, a sentry below had his eye on our astonished adventurer.  Bringing his piece to bear, he bade him stand.  Next moment Israel was under arrest.  Being brought into the presence of the forty prisoners, where they lay in litters of mouldy straw, strewn with gnawed bones, as in a kennel, he recognized among them one Singles, now Sergeant Singles, the man who, upon our hero’s return home from his last Cape Horn voyage, he had found wedded to his mountain Jenny.  Instantly a rush of emotions filled him.  Not as when Damon found Pythias.  But far stranger, because very different.  For not only had this Singles been an alien to Israel (so far as actual intercourse went), but impelled to it by instinct, Israel had all but detested him, as a successful, and perhaps insidious rival.  Nor was it altogether unlikely that Singles had reciprocated the feeling.  But now, as if the Atlantic rolled, not between two continents, but two worlds—­this, and the next—­these alien souls, oblivious to hate, melted down into one.