hands and cast his legs behind him; but when they came into the breakers, the boy was frightened, and clung around the Captain with his legs se fast as almost to sink him. With difficulty he struggled with the waves, and turning back to the shore, found they must inevitably perish together if they thus attempted to proceed. Therefore setting the boy safe on land, he bid him go back to Doctor Mein, who would take care of him, but the poor lad has never since been heard of, though the most diligent inquiries were made after him. As delay was death to him, he plunged again in the stream, and buffeting the waves, pushed for the opposite shore; but he found the tide running upwards so strong, that in spite of all his efforts, he was carried along with the current, and constrained at a considerable distance, to return to the same side of the river. Providentially, at the place where he landed, be discovered by the moonlight, dry on the beach, a canoe, which he immediately seized, and was drawing down to the river, when two black men rushed upon him and demanded whither he was going with that boat. He seized the outrigger of the canoe as his only weapon of defence against the paddles which they had secured, and told them he had lost his way; had urgent business to Tranquebar, and thither he must and would go; and launching with all his remaining strength, the canoe into the river; the good-natured Indians laid down their paddles on the shafts, and whilst he stood in the stern rowed him to the opposite shore. He returned them many thanks, having nothing else to give them, and leaping on the beach, immediately pushed forward with all his might. He found he had as great a distance to pass to the Coleroon as he had already travelled, and therefore continued his course with full speed, the moon shining bright; and before break of day reached this largest arm of the river, of which those which he had

crossed were branches. Exhausted with the fatigue he had undergone, and dismayed with the width of this mighty stream, he stood for a moment hesitating on the brink; but the approach of morning, and the danger behind him being so urgent, he stretched out his arms to the flood, and pressed for the shore. How long he was in crossing he could not ascertain, for somewhat near the centre of the river, he came in contact with the mast of a ship, or a great tree floating with the stream, on this he reclined his hands and his head, in which perilous position, he thought he must have slept by the way, from some confused remembrance as of a person awaking from a state of insensibility, which he supposed had lasted half an hour at least. However, with the light of the morning he had reached the land and flattered himself that all his dangers were passed and his liberty secured; when after passing a jungle which led to the sea-side, he ascended a sand-bank to look around him. There to his terror and surprise, he perceived a party of Hyder's horse scouring the coast, and being discovered by them they galloped up to him; in a moment seized him and stripped him naked, unable to fly or resist, and tying his hands behind his back, fastened a rope to them, and thus drove him before them to the head-quarters, several miles distant, under a burning sun, and covered with blisters. He supposes he must have gone that night and day more than forty miles, beside all the rivers he had crossed. But to what efforts will not the hope of life and liberty prompt? what sufferings and dangers will not men brave to secure them? yet these were but the beginning of his sorrows.

The officer at the head-quarters was a Mahometan, one of Hyder's chieftains. He interrogated the poor prisoner sharply, who he was, whence he came, and whither going? Mr. Wilson gave him an ingenuous account of his escape from Cuddalore, and the rea

sons for it, with all the circumstances attending his flight. The Moorman with wrath, looked at him and said Jute bat,-"that is a lie," as no man ever yet passed the Coleroon by swimming; for if he had but dipped the tip of his fingers in it, the alligators would have seized him. The Captain assured him the truth was so, and gave him such indubitable evidence of the fact that he could no longer doubt the relation; when lifting up both his hands he cried out, Gouda ka Adami! "this is God's man." So Caiaphas prophesied. He was indeed God's man. The Lord had marked him for his own, though as yet he knew him not.

He was immediately marched back, naked and blistered all over, to the former house of his prison, and in aggravated punishment for his flight, Hyder refused him permission to join his fellow officers, his former companions, and thrust him into a dungeon among the meanest captives. Chained to a common soldier, he was next day led out, almost famished, and nearly naked, to march on foot to Seringapatam, in that burning climate, about 500 miles distant. The officers beheld his forlorn condition with great concern, unable to procure him any redress; but they endeavored to alleviate his misery by supplying him with immediate necessaries. One gave him a shirt, another a waistcoat, another stockings and shoes, so that he was once more covered and equipped for his toilsome journey. But the brutes, his conductors, had no sooner marched him off to the first halting place, than they again. stripped him to the skin, and left him only a sorry rag to wrap round his middle.

In this wretched state, chained to another fellow sufferer, under a vertical sun, with a scanty provision of rice only, he had to travel naked and barefoot, five hundred miles, insulted by the brutes who goaded him on all the day, and at night thrust him

into a damp, unwholesome prison, crowded with other miserable objects.

On their way they were brought into Hyder's presence, and strongly urged to enlist in his service, and profess his religion, and thus obtain their liberty: to induce them to which, these horrible severities were inflicted on them, and to escape these at any rate, some of the poor creatures consented. But the Captain rejected these offers with disdain; and though a stranger to a nobler principle, and destitute of all religion, so great a sense of honor impressed him, that he resolved to prefer death, with all its horrors, to desertion and Mahomedism. In various villages through which they passed, in their long march, he was placed under cover, and exhibited to the country people as an object of curiosity, many of them never having seen a white man before. There he was forced to present himself in all possible positions, and to display all the antics of which he was capable, that his conductors might obtain money from these poor villagers at the expense of their captive.

In consequence of the dreadful nature of this march, exposed by day to the heat, and cooped up in a damp prison by night, without clothes, and almost without food, covered with sores, and the irons entering into his flesh, he was, in addition to all the rest of his sufferings, attacked with the flux; and how he arrived at Seringapatam alive, so weakened with disease, is wonderful. Yet greater miseries awaited him there-naked, diseased, and half starved he was thrust into a noisome prison, destitute of food and medicine, with one hundred and fifty three fellow sufferers, chiefly Highlanders of Colonel Macleod's regiment, men of remarkable size and vigor. The very irons which Colonel Baily had worn, weighing thirty-two pounds, were fastened on him, and this peculiar rigor he was informed was

the punishment for his daring to attempt an escape, as well as for his resolute rejection of all the tempt ing offers made him. The other officers were at large, and among them was General Sir David Baird, so lately the avenger of their wrongs, when he stormed this very city. Poor Wilson was imprisoned with the common soldiers, and chained to one of them night and day.

It is hardly possible to express the scenes of unvaried misery, that for two and twenty months he suffered, in this horrible place. The prison was a square, round the walls of which was a kind of barrack for the guard. In the middle was a covered, place open on all sides, exposed to the wind and rain. There without any bed but the earth, or covering but the rags wrapped around him, he was chained to a fellow sufferer, and often so cold, that they have dug a hole in the earth, and buried themselves in it, as some defence from the chilling blasts of the night. Their whole allowance was only a pound of rice a day per man, and one rupee for forty days, or one pice a-day, less than a penny, to provide salt and firing to cook their rice. It will hardly be believed, that it was among their eager employments to collect the white ants, which pestered them in the prison, and fry them, to procure a spoonful or two of their buttery substance. A state of raging hunger was never appeased by an allowance scarcely able to maintain life; and the rice so full of stones, that he could not chew but must swallow it; and often (he said) he was afraid to trust his own fingers in his mouth, lest he should be tempted to bite them. Their rice was brought in a large bowl, containing the portion of a given num ber; but that none might take more than bis share, they provided themselves with a small piece of wood rudely formed into a spoon, which no one was suf fered to use but in his turn; and such was the keen