Jivvy.[1] The prison stood at the very top of the rock, on the edge of a cliff that dropped a clean 300 feet to the river: not at all a pretty place to get clear of, and none so cheerful to live in on a day's allowance of one pound of brown bread, half a pound of bullock's offal, three-halfpence in money (paid weekly, and the most of it deducted for prison repairs, if you please!), and now and then a noggin of peas for a treat. They found half a dozen ships' companies already there, and enjoying themselves on this diet; the crew of the Minerva frigate, run ashore off Cherbourg; the crew of the Hussar, wrecked outside Brest; and—so queerly things fall out in this world—among them a parcel of poor fellows from Ardevora, taken on board the privateer Recovery of this port.
To keep to my story, though—which is about Abe Cummins and Billy Bosistow. It was just in these unhappy conditions that the difference in the two men came out. Abe took his downfall very quiet from the first. He had managed to keep a book in his pocket—a book of voyages it was—and carry it with him all the way from Dieppe, and it really didn't seem to matter to him that he was shut up, so long as he could sit in a corner and read about other folks travelling. In the second year of their captivity an English clergyman, a Mr. Wolfe, came to Jivvy, and got leave from the Commandant to fit
- ↑ Givet in the Ardennes. The river, of course, is the Meuse.
