wife, who conducted him across a network of lanes, courts and gardens to Mrs. Parker's house. Mrs. Parker could not offer to keep him, but presently she caused him to be taken by the girl to an upper room in an isolated and deserted building, whence he could see the ships lying at the Nore. By that time five only of them still flew the red flag. Even the Sandwich had hauled it down. Moreau states that part of the crew had approached Sir Charles Grey on the previous day, and, after coming to an arrangement with him, had arrested Parker and Davis and handed them over upon payment of 12,000 francs (4801.).

Parker, we know, was taken on June 14, and was brought to court-martial on June 22. Moreau avers that the trial took place in the Neptune, off Greenwich,1 because the Admiralty was afraid to hold it at the Nore, where Parker was very popular. Three days later sentence was pronounced. In the meantime the Frenchman spent a most anxious time in his retreat, fearful of so much as looking out of his window, lest he should be recognised by some curious person with a good telescope in the roadstead. In order to see what was going on he arranged a mirror in such a manner as to reflect the whole anchorage to him without obliging him to expose himself. The girl seized favourable opportunities and brought him supplies, assuring him daily that Parker would never be executed, seeing that he had behaved throughout with extraordinary moderation. Mrs. Parker, however, was not of that opinion if, as Moreau assures us, she made a fruitless journey to Windsor in order to appeal to the King on her husband's behalf. Moreau, too, feared the worst; and his excitement on his friend's behalf and for his own safety at length brought on an attack of fever, from which he was only beginning to recover when he was informed by the girl that arrangements had been made for his escape, and that he must hold himself ready to leave for France on the following night-the night of June 28.

Supplied with arms, which he concealed, and disguised as a fisherman, the fugitive was taken at the appointed time to a secluded inlet, where he found a small craft manned by four stalwart seamen, who, having been implicated in the mutiny, were, like himself, anxious to leave the country, and who were disguised much as he was. Delayed by wind and tide, the boat was still in the mouth of the Thames when her people discovered that she

It should be Greenhithe.

had excited the evident suspicions of a brig-of-war, which was bearing down on her. This obliged her to alter course and to head again for the Nore; and soon she fell in with an everincreasing number of little vessels of all kinds, which seemed to be making for Blackstakes. The mutineers were glad enough to lose themselves in the crowd, though they did not relish the idea of once more approaching the fleet of men-of-war. They could not, however, quit their motley consorts without exciting suspicion, and they had to sustain conversation as best they might with their neighbours. The tension of the situation, combined with the fever, made poor Moreau so weak that he collapsed in the bottom of the boat.

When he came to himself again he found that his boat was wedged in among an enormous number of small craft, some of which were full of sightseers, while others belonged to the fleet at the Nore. All were assembled round the Sandwich, from the lofty side of which, at the level of the upper deck, protruded a platform which was held in position by falls from the rigging above. Over it a long cord depended from a yardarm. A man was conducted to the platform. He spoke to a clergyman who accompanied him. Then he addressed the crowd of men in the boats below him, these listening bareheaded and in absolute silence. A gun was fired, the platform fell, and Parker's body swung alone in the air. The fatal signal had almost cut short the culprit's prayers for his ungrateful country,' and his more reasonable expression of a hope that after his death there might be no more executions in respect of what had passed; and when the gun boomed the people, as with one voice, cried 'Amen!'

After the barbarous execution' of his late host, Moreau, with his companions, moving off with the scattering crowd of boats, joined a little flotilla which was making for Margate, and so eluded the gun-brig without again attracting her attention. When night came on the fugitives experienced no difficulty in getting across the Channel, and though at one time chased by a British cutter, reached Calais in the early morning without further adventure. The Frenchman was very ill with fever during the crossing, and did not fully regain consciousness until he found himself in a tavern to which he had been carried. The escaped mutineers ultimately joined an American ship. I have often thought,' says the narrator, that one of them may have lived to become one of those intrepid commodores whose names we love to meet with

52 FRENCH SHARE IN THE MUTINY AT THE NORE.

among those of the hardy seamen of North America.' Poor Perry! Poor Decatur! Moreau himself obtained passage in a coaster to Morlaix, whence he rejoined his demi-brigade at Brest.

I tell the extraordinary story as Moreau de Jonnès tells it. Even if, as I have said, there be not a word of truth in it, it is certainly interesting. I think, however, that there is some foundation of fact at the bottom of the narrative.

W. LAIRD CLOWES.

53

A FEUD IN THE FIVE TOWNS.

WHEN Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt's great shop in Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra Brunt's daughter before he had had time to pull the bell, not only all Machin Street knew it within the hour, but also most persons of consequence left in Hanbridge on a Thursday afternoon -Thursday being early-closing day. For Hanbridge, though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants and is the chief of the Five Towns that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs devoted to the manufacture of earthenware-is a place where the art of attending to other people's business still flourishes in rustic perfection.

Ezra Brunt's drapery establishment was the foremost retail house, in any branch of trade, of the Five Towns. It had no rival nearer than Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and even Manchester could exhibit nothing conspicuously superior to it. The most acutely critical shoppers of the Five Towns, women who were in the habit of coming to London every year for the January sales, spoke of Brunt's as a 'right-down good shop.' And the husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from two hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial magnate of equal importance with themselves. Brunt, who had served his apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street in 1862, when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best shops of the district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous with, but holding itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five Towns. He paid eighty pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop, and in the summer quarter his gas bill was always under a sovereign. For ten years success tarried, but in 1872 his daughter Eva was born and his wife died, and from that moment the sun of his prosperity climbed higher and higher into heaven. He had been profoundly attached to his wife, and, having lost her, he abandoned himself to the mercantile struggle with that morose and terrible ferocity which was the root of his character. Of rude, gaunt aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper, he yet had the precious instinct for soothing

customers. To this day he can surpass his own shopwalkers in the admirable and tender solicitude with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous stereotyped phrase: Are you receiving proper attention, Madam? From the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which allure the populace. He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he found it. He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had no signboard over his shop front; and whereas the name of 'Bostocks,' the huge cheap drapers lower down Machin Street on the opposite side, attacks you at every railway station and in every tramcar, the name of E. Brunt' is to be seen only in a modest regular advertisement on the front page of 'The Staffordshire Signal.' Repose, reticence, respectability: it was these attributes which he decided his shop should possess, and by means of which he succeeded. To enter Brunt's, with its silently swinging doors, its broad, easy staircases, its long floors covered with warm, red linoleum, its partitioned walls, its smooth mahogany counters, its unobtrusive mirrors, its rows of youths and virgins in black, and its pervading atmosphere of quietude and discretion, was like entering a temple before the act of oblation has commenced. You were conscious of some supreme administrative influence everywhere imposing itself. That influence was Ezra Brunt. And yet the man differed utterly from the thing he had created. His was one of those dark and passionate souls which smoulder in this harsh midland district as slag-heaps smoulder on the pit-banks, revealing their strange fires only in the darkness.

In 1899 Brunt's establishment occupied four shops, Nos. 52, 56, 58 and 60, in Machin Street. He had bought the freeholds at a price which timid people regarded as exorbitant, but the solicitors of Hanbridge secretly applauded his enterprise and shrewdness in anticipating the enormous rise in ground-values which has now been in rapid, steady progress there for more than a decade. He had thrown the interiors together and rebuilt the frontages in handsome freestone. He had also purchased several shops opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut a new street leading from his premises to the Market Square. Such a scheme would have met with general approval. But there was one serious hiatus in the plans of Ezra Brunt-to wit, No. 54 Machin Street. No. 54, separating 52 and 56, was a