“Left, left,” says he; “keep to your left hand, mate Jim! Under the trees with you! There’s where I killed my first goat. They don’t come down here now; they’re all mastheaded on them mountings for the fear of Benjamin Gunn. Ah! and there’s the cetemery”⁠—cemetery he must have meant. “You see the mounds? I come here and prayed, nows and thens, when I thought maybe a Sunday would be about doo. It weren’t quite a chapel, but it seemed more solemn like; and then, says you, Ben Gunn was shorthanded⁠—no chapling, nor so much as a Bible and a flag, you says.”

So he kept talking as I ran, neither expecting nor receiving any answer.

The cannon-shot was followed, after a considerable interval, by a volley of small arms.

Another pause, and then, not a quarter of a mile in front of me, I beheld the Union Jack flutter in the air above a wood.