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‘At five in the morning his wife woke him, and declared that in her belief the lad was still abroad. If he had returned and gone to his garret she must have heard; but she had heard nothing. She harped on this till my grandfather climbed out and went to the garret for a look; and sure enough the bed was empty.

‘They lay awake till daylight, the pair of them, cogitating this and that. But when the dawn came, my grandfather could stand it no longer. He pulled on his breeches and boots, went downstairs, and had scarcely thrown open the door before he heard screams and saw a wretched figure, naked to the shirt, running across the yard towards the house. It was Nathan the Jew, and he tumbled in front of my grandfather, and caught hold of him by the boots while he yelled for mercy.

‘What do you suppose, was the explanation? My grandfather could scarcely make head or tail of it, even after listening to the Jew’s story. And neither he nor my grandmother ever set eyes on the prisoner lad again. But about nine months later there came a letter from America that helped to clear things up.

‘The poor boy–so he wrote in his letter–being turned loose under the sky after fifteen months of captivity, just couldn’t go back to the garret. Though the night was pitch black and full of mist, and the stars hidden, he wanted no more than to pace to and fro, and look up and open his chest to it. To and fro he went, a bit farther each time, but always keeping my grandfather’s directions somewhere at the back of his mind, and always searching back till he could see the glimmer of whitewash showing him where the house stood. In the letter he sent to my grandmother he told very freely of the thoughts that came to him there while he felt his way back and forth; and to a staid woman that had never been shut up behind bars the writing–or the most of it–was mad enough. “Liberty! Liberty!” it kept saying: and “good though it was, how much better if he’d been able to see just one star through the fog!”

‘By little and little he stretched his tether so far, forgetting how the time went, that the dawn overtook him a good half-mile from the house; and through the gray of it he caught sight of a man standing about fifty yards away, and right in his path. He turned to run, and then his heart almost jumped out of his mouth as he saw another man standing to catch him with arms held wide!

‘But what had happened was, he had strayed into the pea-patch and the figure with its arms stretched out was no man at all, but a scarecrow. The lad had no sooner made sure of this than he whipped behind it, stretched out his hands upon the cross-trees that served it for arms, and clung there, praying.

‘Now the man creeping down the field was Nathan the Jew. He had been wandering the Moor all night, crazy with terror; and when the dawn showed him a house, he could have turned Christian and dropped on his knees. But casting a glance over his shoulder as he ran towards it, he caught sight of the scarecrow. For a second or two he ran faster, believing it to be either a man or a ghost. He took another glance back and came to a halt.

‘He knew it now for a scarecrow. He stood, and he stood, and he eyed it.

‘The scarecrow had a suit of clothes that was all tatters, and an old beaver hat. It was the hat that took Nathan’s fancy. Beaver hats cost a deal of money in those days: but they had a knack of lasting, and Nathan had scarcely ever met with one, however old, that he couldn’t sell for a few pence. For a minute or so he stood there, letting his sense of business get the better of his fright; then he swallowed down the last doubt sticking in his throat, walked straight up to the scarecrow, and made a grab at the hat.

‘”Leave my head alone, can’t you?” said the scarecrow. And with that Mr Nathan dropped in a fit; yet not so quick but that before dropping he caught a straight blow full on the jaw.

‘When he came to, his coat was gone, and his bag, and his hats, including the scarecrow’s. But the rest of the scarecrow stood over him, with its arms stretched out just as before; and he picked himself up and ran from it.

‘As for the lad, by this time he had made the best of two miles towards Plymouth. In his letter he apologised very prettily to my grandmother for not saying good-bye. He owed his life to her, he said; but being taken unawares he had done the best he could in the circumstances.’