time after, of
performing such a service as no man in the army would have undertaken.
It happened thus: the engineer who was to set fire to the train of a
mine which had been made under a bastion of the enemy's, happened to
have drank very hard over night, and mistaking the hour, laid the match
an hour sooner than he ought. A sentinel immediately came out, called
out aloud, _What, have you clapped fire to the train? There's twenty
people in the mine who will be all blown up; it should not have been
fired till 12 o'clock._

On hearing this Hewlet ran in with his sword drawn, and therewith cut
off the train the moment before it would have given fire to all the
barrels of powder that were within, by which he saved the lives of all
the pioneers who were carrying the mines still forward at the time the
wild fire was unseasonably lighted by the engineer.

At the battle of Landau he had his skull broken open by a blow from the
butt end of a musket. This occasioned his going through the operation
called trepanning, which is performed by an engine like a coffee-mill,
which being fixed on the bruised part of the bone, is turned round, and
cuts out all the black till the edges appear white and sound. After this
cure had been performed upon him, he never had his senses in the same
manner as he had before, but upon the least drinking fell into a passion
which was but very little removed from madness.

He returned into England after the Peace of Ryswick, and being taken
into a gentleman's service, he there married a wife, by whom he had nine
children. Happy was it for them that they were all dead before his
disastrous end.

How Hewlet came to be employed as a watchman a little before his death,
the papers I have give me no account of, only that he was in that
station at the time of the death of Joseph Candy, for whose murder he
was indicted for giving him a mortal bruise on the head with his staff.

On the 26th of December, 1724, upon full evidences of eye-witnesses, the
jury found him guilty, he making no other defence than great
asservations of his innocence, and an obstinate denial of the fact.
After his conviction, being visited in the condemned hold, instead of
showing any marks of penitence or contrition, he raved against the
witnesses who had been produced to destroy him, called them all
perjured, and prayed God to inflict some dreadful judgment on them. Nay,
he went so far as to desire that he ought himself have the exe