“This the man readily consented to do, and the woman set before me a large bowl of milk, and some bread, which I ate as soon as I had put on a pair of breeches, smock, and broad hat.  Now I felt perfectly safe.  They might send news all over the country of the escape of a French officer, but as I had never spoken a word of English, from the time that I was taken, no one would suspect a countryman speaking English to be the man whom they were in search of.

“After leaving the cottage, I travelled quietly to Rye.  I thought it best to go there, for it was likely that it would be difficult, elsewhere, for an unknown man to get a passage to France, and it struck me that the man who took us across before, would carry me over the first time he was going with despatches.  I found him easily enough, and though I was not dressed quite in the same way as I was when we called on him before, he recognized me at once.

“‘Another job for me?’ he asked.

“‘Not a special one,’ I said.  ’I am going across again, but there is no occasion for you to make a special trip, and indeed my employer forgot to give me an order upon you.  I should have gone back, if I had remembered it, but I thought you would not mind giving me a passage the next time you sailed across.’

“As the man remembered that we had made ourselves pleasant on board, he agreed at once to take me, next time the boat should be going.  I laid out a pound in getting a coat more suitable for travelling in France than the peasant’s smock.  Then I took a lodging in a small inn.

“Three days later, a messenger came down with an order for the man to take him across at once, and as the captain charged me nothing for my passage, I had enough left to pay for my place in a diligence, and on arriving in Paris duly reported myself, at the barracks, as having returned.

“My first enquiry, of course, was about you and O’Sullivan.  I found that he had never been heard of, but that you had lost a hand, and had been promoted to a captaincy; had been very ill, and had gone to the south of France on sick leave.

“After I heard that, I remained for two or three months at the depot, and then learned that the Duke of Berwick had just arrived from Dauphiny.  I at once went to see him.  He told me he could not put me on his staff again, as his numbers were complete, but would give me a letter to the Duke of Orleans, asking him to employ me in that capacity.  When I got down here, I found that the duke had left, and that the Marshal de Bay was in command.

“On reading Berwick’s letter, he at once appointed me one of his aides-de-camp.  You were away, I found to my great disappointment, and I was sent off into Catalonia, with orders for four battalions to be sent at once to Badajos.  I arrived here yesterday, in time for the shindy.”

“Fortunately, O’Neil, I do not think there is much fear of another Oudenarde.  There is no royal duke here, to interfere with our general; and the Portuguese are not to be compared with the Hanoverians, and Dutch, and the other allies that fought against us there.”