I've seen the inside of a French prison before now.

Give way, Bill, and have it over.' A minute later, with a low grating sound, we ran aground upon a gravelly leach.

My bundle was thrown ashore, I stepped after it, and a seaman pushed the prow off again, springing in as his comrade backed her into deep water.

Already the glow in the west had vanished, the storm-cloud was half up the heavens, and a thick blackness had gathered over the ocean.

As I turned to watch the vanishing boat a keen wet blast flapped in my face, and the air was filled with the high piping of the wind and with the deep thunder of the sea.
And thus it was that, on a wild evening in the early spring of the year 1805, I, Louis de Laval, being in the twenty-first year of my age, returned, after an exile of thirteen years, to the country of which my family had for many centuries been the ornament and support.