In this way, although I was so left-handed a toy-maker, I made out
to be rather a successful merchant; and found means to procure many
little delicacies and alleviations, such as children or prisoners
desire.

I am scarcely drawing the portrait of a very melancholy man. It is
not indeed my character; and I had, in a comparison with my
comrades, many reasons for content. In the first place, I had no
family: I was an orphan and a bachelor; neither wife nor child
awaited me in France. In the second, I had never wholly forgot the
emotions with which I first found myself a prisoner; and although a
military prison be not altogether a garden of delights, it is still
preferable to a gallows. In the third, I am almost ashamed to say
it, but I found a certain pleasure in our place of residence:
being an obsolete and really mediaeval fortress, high placed and
commanding extraordinary prospects, not only over sea, mountain,
and champaign but actually over the thoroughfares of a capital
city, which we could see blackened by day with the moving crowd of
the inhabitants, and at night shining with lamps. And lastly,
although I was not insensible to the restraints of prison or the
scantiness of our rations, I remembered I had sometimes eaten quite
as ill in Spain, and had to mount guard and march perhaps a dozen
leagues into the bargain. The first of my troubles, indeed, was
the costume we were obliged to wear. There is a horrible practice
in England to trick out in ridiculous uniforms, and as it were to
brand in mass, not only convicts but military prisoners, and even
the children in charity schools. I think some malignant genius had
found his masterpiece of irony in the dress which we were condemned
to wear: jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a sulphur or mustard
yellow, and a shirt or blue-and-white striped cotton. It was