with, crept out,
and after climbing the low wall found himself on a raw November night,
with the rain falling in torrents, a stark-naked,
head-shaved-and-blistered but once more a free man. In this condition he
wandered on throughout the night, and just before daylight he entered a
cemetery to find that refuge among the dead of which he thought himself
so cruelly deprived by the living.

Beneath the entrance to the church there was a passage which led to some
family vaults in the basement, and he crept down the passage to seek
some shelter for his nude body from the driving rain, which had chilled
him through. While groping about in the dark his hand rested on
something soft, which, to his unbounded delight, proved to be an old
coat which had probably been left there by the sexton and forgotten. He
remained hidden all day, and traveled through the fields all night,
during which he found a scarecrow, from which he transferred to his own
person its old hat and trousers.

He said that although so hungry, he never had felt so happy as he did at
finding himself once more dressed up. After proceeding a few miles
farther, he ventured into a laborer's cottage in quest of food, which
was given him, and with it a pair of old boots. As dilapidated, ragged,
vagabond-looking, honest people are common in England, no questions were
asked, and he proceeded on his way rejoicing in that freedom of which he
had been deprived for ten years or more.

Amid all his pranks he had never been charged with idleness, and now
worked at odd jobs about the farms until he had procured a decent suit
of clothes, when he applied to a master house painter for work as a
journeyman, though he had never done anything of that kind. The master,
pleased with his appearance, gave him a trial, but the first job showed
such ignorance of the art of house painting that he was forthwith
discharged with half a day's wages. However, he had picked up some
valuable hints, and being very apt by the time he had been more or less
summarily discharged from half a dozen places he had become a good
workman, and henceforth had no trouble about retaining any situation as
long as he refrained from beer and restrained his temper; but at the
slightest fault-finding on the part of the master he would fly into a
passion and throw up the situation, and this, especially, if he
suspected that anything had leaked out about his imprisonment.

While at work with a companion at painting