and there discovered the desperadoes in perfect readiness for the attempt. At sight of their daggers, which they endeavoured to conceal among the rubbish, it was with difficulty that the soldiers were restrained from putting them to the bayonet. They were immediately put in irons and sent on board a prison-ship, there to atone on half-rations for their intended mischief.' From these hulks in the harbour attempts to escape were, we learn, much more frequent. In the year 1806 'seven French prisoners cut a hole in the side of the Crown prison-ship at Portsmouth. Six of them were taken at once; the other supposed drowned.' On October 8, 1818, two French prisoners escaped from a prisonship at Portsmouth at night: one was drowned; the other was found in the mud and sent back to the ship from whence he had escaped.' The last extract is specially interesting, as the unfortunate captive was the marine painter, Louis Garneray, whose name we have already mentioned, and who was afterwards released on parole, and lived for some years at Bishop's Waltham.

It will be easily understood that among the large number of captives confined in the castle and in the hulks were many men of dangerous character, and acts of savagery were only too frequent among them. An informer being discovered on board the Prothée in Portsmouth harbour, he was seized by his fellow-prisoners, and tattooed on the face with the terrible sentence, 'This villain betrayed his brethren to the English.' Maddened with agony and shame, the poor wretch, when released by his tormentors, rushed on deck and tried to leap overboard, but fell and broke his leg. He afterwards entered the English service, being afraid to return to his own country. Here is another extract. 'In November

1796, the prisoners on board the Hero prison-ship detected a thief in their midst. They accordingly tied him down to a ring on the deck, and flogged him most unmercifully. They then trampled upon him, and the man actually expired under their barbarous treatment.'

Duels, as may well be imagined, were not of uncommon occurrence, and several, with fatal results, are known to have taken place within the castle of Portchester. The weapons used were of the most nondescript character. Nails, or knives, or scissor-blades fastened with string to sticks a few feet long, or even a wooden foil with a sharpened point, were made to serve the purpose with deadly effect. Several executions, too, took place within the castle walls, In July 1796, a young French seaman, named

Vallérie Coffré, only twenty-two years of age, was condemned to death at Winchester for stabbing a fellow-countryman with a large cook's knife. He is said to have heard without concern the dreadful sentence, that on the following Monday morning he was to be taken at 4 o'clock in a post-chaise to Portchester, and there to be executed about 6 A.M., and his body to be afterwards dissected.' The hanging of a French prisoner seems to have been regarded in the neighbourhood as a most exhilarating spectacle, and as many as twenty thousand persons are said to have assembled at Portchester in order to witness the execution of one Antoine Tardit, convicted of murdering a fellow-captive. Indeed, so improving was the sight considered, that on these occasions—so at least tradition asserts the village children were always allowed a holiday in order to witness it!

Sickness at times was terribly rife among the prisoners. We find, for instance, that at Forton in 1794 nearly two hundred died in a single month; while in November 1810, no less than eight hundred men were reported as sick. It was the same at Portchester. The negroes captured in the West Indies suffered the most severely. The winter which followed their arrival at the castle proved to be an exceptionally hard one, and some hundreds of them perished from the cold, while not a few of the survivors were crippled for life. It is difficult, however, to estimate the number of deaths among the prisoners, as no register of their burials appears to have been kept; and the parish churchyard, situated within the castle walls, was not used as their place of interment. The corpses of French prisoners seem to have been buried in any waste corner of the parish, chiefly-so tradition asserts—on the strip of shore outside the castle walls, which is covered at high water by the tide. Skeletons, however, have been discovered in various parts of the parish, sometimes in considerable numbers, and generally without any indication of a coffin. These burials were done by contract, and the same coffin, so again tradition has it, served to carry numberless bodies to their burial. But while the prisoners were buried anyhow and anywhere, in the roughest possible fashion, and with the least trouble and expense, the soldiers on guard who died at Portchester were interred in the parish churchyard. And among them the mortality was great.

The majority of the prisoners are said to have been ribald atheists, and to have openly scoffed at all forms of religious belief. It is pleasant, however, to be able to add that two French priests,

who had taken refuge in England from the horrors of the Reign of Terror, and who were allowed by the British Government to reside at Portchester, succeeded in winning the respect and affection of all within the castle walls. Their names were respectively Le Bail and Le Lait, and they were ever ready, not only to give spiritual help and consolation to those who would accept their ministrations, but also to share with the more destitute prisoners their miserable pittance of fourteen shillings a week.

The enormous cost of clothing and feeding the French prisoners fell almost entirely, owing to the neglect of Napoleon, upon the British Government, and doubtless the food was not always of the choicest description. The Frenchmen are said to have shown a great partiality for soup, which they would occasionally make out of the most unsavoury ingredients. An old resident, drawing near his century, who well remembered as a boy the stirring times of the French prisoners, told the writer a few years ago that some of the prisoners would catch with baited hooks the rats which swarmed among the old buildings of the castle, and boil them down into soup for supper! In the year 1796 an alarming inundation occurred at Portchester, which swept away an immense quantity of provisions which had come down from London for the use of the prisoners. The account of it is thus given in 'The London Chronicle' for February 9-11, 1796. At Portchester, on the 26th ult., the wind blew a hurricane, and gave such power to the tide that it rose to a prodigious height, and having driven away the great bank between the sea and the marshes, it completely deluged the whole village, wherein the water stood at the height of many feet, forced open the doors of almost all the houses, and carried away every article of furniture that floated. The greatest sufferers were Mr. Clemmence and Mr. Hubbard, two gentlemen belonging to the castle, whose houses, from the lowness of their situations, were almost covered with water. Moreover, a large quantity of articles, which the latter had that morning received from London for the use of the French prisoners, were totally spoiled. In short, the inundation was such as exceeded. everything of the kind that had before happened at that place.'

After the battle of Waterloo and the abdication of Napoleon, the English Ministry, in conjunction with the French Government, agreed to restore the prisoners to their country, on the sole condition that they would first declare their adherence to the Bourbon dynasty, in token of which they were to hoist the white

flag of France on the summit of the castle tower. This proposal was extremely unpalatable to the majority of the French officers, who, in fact, absolutely refused to agree to it. The commissioners who represented the French Embassy waited the event with some anxiety from morning to evening of a long summer's day. During that period,' says an eye-witness, from whose mouldy manuscript we have gathered several interesting incidents, the prisoners in the castle appeared like a vast hive of bees about to swarm. Knots of Frenchmen, in their short yellow jackets and grey caps, covered the entire area of the castle, and argued the question of submission with all the vehemence and gesticulation common to their nation. At length, as evening approached, principle gave place to prudence. The Bonapartists made a virtue of necessity, and gave way. A loud shout of "Vive le Roi!" proclaimed the allegiance of the prisoners to the House of Bourbon, and at the same moment the white flag of old France rose and floated over the Norman keep of Portchester.'

Arrangements were at once hurried forward for the liberation of the prisoners, who a few days later embarked at the water-gate, amid loud rejoicings, for the shores of France, and by the end of June not a single Frenchman was left within the walls of Portchester Castle. For twenty years, with the exception of a short period which followed the peace of Amiens in 1802, the castle had been occupied by prisoners of war, while at least two thousand men belonging to the various regiments on guard had been quartered in the village. But with the departure of the prisoners in the summer of 1815 the village quickly returned to its former condition of quiet and repose. The militia regiments were disbanded, and the barracks which they occupied, together with the military hospital, were pulled down. The wooden buildings inside the castle walls were cleared away, and before long the ruin reverted to its former state of silence and desolation. Once more the jackdaws returned to their ancient haunts, and owls again occupied the ivy-mantled tower, while a pair of kestrels took up their quarters in the lofty keep. Once more the grass grew rank in the great enclosure, and not a sign of the sojourn of the French prisoners remained, except the names of some of them carved on the stone walls near the summit of the Norman keep.

JOHN VAUGHAN.

227

SMOXFORD'S ATONEMENT.

J.

ALTHOUGH Bull Smoxford was the direct offspring of the New World, he yet inherited from some far-off forbears belonging to the other hemisphere the germs of certain antique ambitions which have obtained among the older civilisations throughout the ages. To put it shortly, Smoxford aspired to be the head of both Church and State.

It was a distinct throw-back, and as such suggests many interesting reflections. Experience, however, has taught us that this over-centralised form of government is only workable up to a well-ascertained point; after that the results are frequently disastrous. But Smoxford knew nothing about history, and the fact that in the long run it does not do to mix one's ambitions any more than it does to mix one's liquors remained a sealed book to him.

Yet there is no saying that he might not have lived on to a picturesque old age as a recognised Out West Pioneer,' until the elder men told tales of the prowess of his youth by way of dislocating the pride of the rising generation, had he not been driven by the conflicting elements in his nature to tread blindly on his own destiny.

Now Smoxford was at once the corner-stone of the local church and the terror of the neighbourhood.

That is, he was the terror of Reddy's Gulch and Pietsland, right away to the great marsh which divides Pietsland from Cougar Mountain, and which has terrors enough, both real and imaginary, of its own.

The population of Reddy's Gulch, where Smoxford chiefly resided, asked one another, in whispers and behind shot bolts, why Providence should be so lax as to permit him to cumber the earth any longer. But that was of course a biased view of the case, since it is known that there is nothing on the face of this earth without its appointed purpose, and Bull Smoxford was saved from being an exception to the rule by the fact that his peculiarities lent colour and piquancy to the otherwise dull existence of the community, who severally felt life to be a precarious blessing