dying prisoner, might be allowed to breathe the air beyond his prison walls. No answer was returned to this request; but Sir Sidney soon after reviving, a plan was successfully devised, by which he effected his escape.
A friend had provided him with a false passport, a sword, a pistol, and a loose great-coat; and thus provided, sleeping by night in obscure road-side cabarets, and by day proceeding cautiously by bye-roads, he made his way through Normandy. Following the windings of the Seine, and avoiding Rouen and other great cities, he finally got to the coast in the neighbourhood of Havre. This was a dangerous spot, for it was here that he had been captured, and consequently his person was known to the authorities; but he was aware that a number of British ships of war were blockading that port, and if he could only communicate with these, he knew that his escape would be easy. Having secreted himself in a little town at a considerable distance from the coast, he walked to the sea shore, where he arrived in the dusk of the evening, and here, at length, he was so fortunate as to find a solitary fisherman in charge of several boats. Sir Sidney, who had spoken French from a child with the fluency of a native, told the man that he had a particular reason for wishing to visit one of the English ships lying off the harbour, and that he would give a handsome reward to be conveyed aboard. The poor fisherman consented on condition that the stranger would wait till it was later, and meanwhile invited him to his cottage to take rest before starting. Sir Sidney accepted his offer, and followed him to a cottage, where a poor old woman, the fisherman's wife,
