Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/242

234 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 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