On which Blunt, waiting for no further orders, marched directly in the midst of the enemy's fire to the dead bodies, which law within ten yards of the muzzle of their pieces, and turning over several of the dead bodies, he distinguished that of the cadet, and brought away the prize for which he had so fairly ventured.
This action put Hewlet on his mettle. He resolved to do something that might equal it, and an opportunity offered some time after, of performing such a service as no man in the army would have undertaken. It happened thus: the engineer who was to set fire to the train of a mine which had been made under a bastion of the enemy's, happened to have drank very hard over night, and mistaking the hour, laid the match an hour sooner than he ought. A sentinel immediately came out, called out aloud, _What, have you clapped fire to the train? There's twenty people in the mine who will be all blown up; it should not have been fired till 12 o'clock._
On hearing this Hewlet ran in with his sword drawn, and therewith cut off the train the moment before it would have given fire to all the barrels of powder that were within, by which he saved the lives of all the pioneers who were carrying the mines still forward at the time the wild fire was unseasonably lighted by the engineer.
At the battle of Landau he had his skull broken open by a blow from the butt end of a musket. This occasioned his going through the operation called trepanning, which is performed by an engine like a coffee-mill, which being fixed on the bruised part of the bone, is turned round, and cuts out all the black till the edges appear white and sound. After this cure had been performed upon him, he never had his senses in the same manner as he had before, but upon the least drinking fell into a passion which was but very little removed from madness.
He returned into England after the Peace of Ryswick, and being taken into a gentleman's service, he there married a wife, by whom he had nine children. Happy was it for them that they were all dead before his disastrous end.
How Hewlet came to be employed as a watchman a little before his death, the papers I have give me no account of, only that he was in that station at the time of the death of Joseph Candy, for whose murder he was indicted for giving him a mortal bruise on the head with his staff.