While these things were going on in the Netherlands, another leader
under the Grand Alliance, Prince Louis of Baden, took Landau, on the
Rhine, from the French. In Italy, too, the allies triumphed, the
gallant Prince Eugene, presently to be the warm and life-long friend
of Marlborough, defeating the French brilliantly at Cremona, a
fortunate thing for the Empire, which was thus secured from a French
invasion through the Tyrol.

To crown the successes of the Grand Alliance during the campaign of
1702, the first of the war, the brave sailor Sir George Rooke,
following the Spanish galleons and the French war vessels into the
harbour of Vigo, destroyed the greater number of them. It was a
repetition of Drake's famous expedition to "singe the King of Spain's
beard."

All these things happened while George Fairburn and other English
prisoners ate their hearts out in captivity at Dunkirk. The lad chafed
under the surveillance to which he was subjected, and never passed a
day without turning over in his mind some scheme of escape. How it was
to be done, he did not see. But he waited for his chance, and
meanwhile, partly to avoid being suspected, and partly to while away
the hours he made friends with the soldiers on guard. He already knew
a little French, and with his natural quickness he soon made rapid
progress. At the end of a month he could get along capitally in the
language; at the end of three months he could speak the tongue
fluently; at the end of nine months--for thus did his term of
captivity drag itself out--he was, so far as the language was
concerned, almost a Frenchman. Thus the winter passed, and the spring
of 1703 came round, George Fairburn still an inmate of a French