of my neighbours. They examined my trunks and my drawers a second time, to see if there were not false bottoms to them; they were mean enough to stoop to take the buckles out of one's shoes. This visit was soon followed by another, to examine if our garden was not convenient to make a burying-ground of. Though no small one, they did not find it big enough. They afterwards went to another prison, a few doors from us, where they found a part of the garden would suit them, and where they occasioned to be dug a great hole, in which in a very few days they stove in two thousand two hundred corpses, and afterwards proceeded to make another hole of the kind, which they palisaded round, and was in a field opposite our prison. Having been tried by the council and acquitted, I concluded I had been out of harm's way; but from the above proceedings and unpleasant reports that went about, we concluded we were all of us destined for the other world. But very luckily for us, Robespierre and many of his party were overthrown on the 9th, and they had fixed on the 9th for a general massacre in the prisons.
"Thus! thus! and no nearer!" say the seamen. After that event there was a general cry in favour of the prisoners, and many were daily set at liberty; by which means my habitation became so thinned of its inhabitants that they transferred us to another prison; but they forgot me in the scramble, and I remained there alone for some time, having the whole house to range in, and thirty men, who used to mount guard night and day, to watch my person. At length they found they had left me by myself, and that it was not absolutely necessary to harass such a number of men to guard a single harmless prisoner. They ordered me to follow my companions to the Luxembourg,[1] where I found G. O'Hara and his
- ↑ November 25, 1794.
