"A ND SO, TO SUM UP, I must confess that I too was absent during the onslaught of these Black-guards— a shame that I shall never out-live," said Charles White, who had just related, to an astonished Chamber, an improbable yarn about a wild goose chase down the River Thames: a venture that had been undertaken on the strength of assurances from Colonel Barnes and Sir Isaac Newton that it would culminate in the capture of Jack the Coiner, but that in fact had ended with a fire in a broken-down, abandoned coastal watch-tower, and a lot of confused and misled dragoons storming around in benighted mud-flats. A boat or two had been sighted, and pursued, until darkness had fallen. Sir Isaac had been rescued from a drifting wreck where he and another aged Whig Natural Philosopher had been found down in the bilge playing with a jack-in-the-box.