he earth, and got some relief by bathing our breasts and temples.

The soldiers kept stirring all day in the bottom of the valley, now
changing guard, now in patrolling parties hunting among the rocks. These
lay round in so great a number, that to look for men among them was like
looking for a needle in a bottle of hay! and, being so hopeless a task,
it was gone about with the less care. Yet we could see the soldiers pike
their bayonets among the heather, which sent a cold thrill into my
vitals; and they would sometimes hang about our rock, so that we scarce
dared to breathe.

It was in this way that I first heard the right English speech; one
fellow as he went by actually clapping his hand upon the sunny face of
the rock on which we lay, and plucking it off again with an oath. "I
tell you it's 'ot," says he; and I was amazed at the clipping tones and
the odd sing-song in which he spoke, and no less at that strange trick
of dropping out the letter "h". To be sure, I had heard Ransome; but he
had taken his ways from all sorts of people, and spoke so imperfectly at
the best, that I set down the most of it to childishness. My surprise
was all the greater to hear that manner of speaking in the mouth of a
grown man; and indeed I have never grown used to it; nor yet altogether
with the English grammar, as perhaps a very critical eye might here and
there spy out even in these memoirs.

The tediousness and pain of these hours upon the rock grew only the
greater as the day went on; the rock getting still the hotter and the
sun fiercer. There were giddiness, and sickness, and sharp pangs like
rheumatism, to be supported. I minded then, and have often minded since,
on the lines in our Scots psalm--

"The moon by night thee shall not smite,
Nor yet the sun by day";

and indeed it was only by God's blessing that we were neither of us
sun-smitten.

At last, about two, it was beyond men's bearing, and there was now
temptation to resist, as well as pain to thole. For the sun being now
got a little into the west, there came a patch of shade on the east side
of our rock, which was the side sheltered from the soldiers.

"As well one death as another," said Alan, and slipped over the edge and
dropped on the ground on the shadowy side.

I followed him at once, and instantly fell all my length, so weak was I
and so giddy with that long exposure. Here, then, we lay for an hour or
two, aching from head to foot, as weak as water