Being on board a private armed ship, Israel had little dreamed of its liability to the same governmental hardships with the meanest merchantman.

But the system of impressment is no respecter either of pity or person.
His mind was soon determined.

Unlike his shipmates, braving immediate and lonely hazard, rather than wait for a collective and ultimate one, he cunningly dropped himself overboard the same night, and after the narrowest risk from the muskets of the man-of-war's sentries (whose gangways he had to pass), succeeded in swimming to shore, where he fell exhausted, but recovering, fled inland, doubly hunted by the thought, that whether as an Englishman, or whether as an American, he would, if caught, be now equally subject to enslavement.
Shortly after the break of day, having gained many miles, he succeeded in ridding himself of his seaman's clothing, having found some mouldy old rags on the banks of a stagnant pond, nigh a rickety building, which looked like a poorhouse--clothing not improbably, as he surmised, left there on the bank by some pauper suicide.

Marvel not that he should with avidity seize these rags; what the suicides abandon, the living hug.
Once more in beggar's garb, the fugitive sped towards London, prompted by the same instinct which impels the hunted fox to the wilderness; for solitudes befriend the endangered wild beast, but crowds are the security, because the true desert, of persecuted man.

Among the things of the capital, Israel for more than forty years was yet to disappear, as one entering at dusk into a thick wood.