e
Jack." When he was rich and old and famous, he was "Starvation Jack" to
them. And of such are the caprices of a vain, precipitate age. But I am
glad I saw him, Whig and pinchpenny as he was. I am proud of having seen
this Great Captain and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The King of
Prussia, the Duke of Cumberland, my Lord George Sackville, Marshal
Biron, Duke Richelieu, and many of the chiefest among the Turkish
bashaws, have I known and conversed with; but I still feel that Man's
trembling hand on my head; my blood is still fired, as at the sound of a
trumpet, by the remembrance of his voice; I still rejoice at my fortune
in having set eyes, if only for a moment, on John Churchill, Duke of
Marlborough.

It was on the Twenty-ninth of January (o.s.) that our servants, who had
declared to having heard the death-watch ticking for days, asserted that
those ominous sounds grew faster and faster, resolving themselves at
length into those five distinct taps, with a break between, which are
foolishly held by the vulgar to spell out the word DEATH. And although
the noise came probably from some harmless insect, or from a rat
nibbling at the wainscot, that sound never meets my ear--and I have
heard it on board ship many a time, and in gaol, and in my tent in the
desert--without a lump of ice sliding down my back. As for Ghosts, John
Dangerous has seen too many of them to be frightened.[G]

That night I slept none. It was always my lot in that huge house to be
put, little fellow as I was, in the hugest of places. My bed was as
spacious as a Turkish divan. Its yellow silken quilt, lined with
eiderdown, and embroidered with crimson flowers, was like a great waving
field of ripe corn with poppies in it. When I lay down, great weltering
waves of Bed came and rolled over me; and my bolster alone was as big as
the cook's hammock at sea, who has always double bedding, being swollen
with other men's rations. This bed had posts tall and thick enough to
have been Gerard the Giant's lancing-pole, that used to stand in the
midst of the bakehouse in Basing Lane; and its curtains of yellow
taffety hung in folds so thick that I always used to think birds nestled
among them. That night I dreamt that the bed was changed into our great
red pew at St. George's, only that it was hung with dark velvet instead
of scarlet baize, and that the clergyman in the pulpit overhead, with a
voice angrier than ever, was reading that service for the martyrdom