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
prison, hopeless of escape, so far as he could see.
But his chance came at last suddenly and unexpectedly. One morning he
was escorted to the Hotel de Ville, to interpret for an officer
examining a batch of English prisoners who had been brought in from
the Netherlands border.
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