superb feelings. Our camp is about half distance between Portalègre and Alegrete-a long league from either place and immediately under the Sierra of Saint Mamed: the situation is healthy, and as a picture it is beautiful. About a mile nearer to Portalegre we have established our head-quarters, at an excellent Quinta, which I have named at the beginning of my letter. There are gardens, fruits, abundance of wood, and variety of it; water just as you please-in fountains, lake, stream, cascade, or mill-race; mountain, craggy and uncovered; valley of vine; olive (I was going to say milk and honey), in a favoured district of S. Mamed; close at hand, a forest of chestnut trees, a many-twinkling wood, through which you can ride for miles by excellent roads, unbonneted, under a meridian sun, and mistake it for the moonlight. And to be sheltered from such a sun as we have nowadays awakens a sort of sensation that we feel far from disagreeable, when we have something dreadful near us which we are conscious is prevented from doing us harm.

6

There are nothing but cottages to interrupt you in these rides, and cottages sometimes in such places as make you stop and stare, and wonder how they got there. What is there in all this to make us envy head-quarters, Castaños, and the 1st Division? I went yesterday to pay the visit that everybody pays, and returned to my woods, exclaiming, with Erminia's shepherd, "O corte, addio!"

A young hermit is a stupid fellow, too. I hope you do not expect that I shall become one. But I like a morning's ride by myself, and I shall often climb into the woods I have been describing to you if our gipsy life continues.

There is every chance of our remaining as we are for a month or six weeks. Two divisions have crossed the Tagus. The rest are cantoned in the healthy parts of the Alentejo.'

CHAPTER XI.

1811-1812.

THE PASS OF PERALES-GRAND SCENERY-STORMS-GUARDA- PROMOTION TO MAJORITY-ASSISTANT QUARTERMASTER-GENERAL--STORMING OF CIUDAD RODRIGO-CAPTURE-ADVANCE UPON BADAJOS.

'Payo, near the Pass of Perales, Sierra de Gata: August 16, 1811.

'How many times have I had the pen in my hand since we began our march from Portalègre, devoted, as I intended it should be, to your service, and have been obliged to employ it upon other subjects. War, you see, is very much in our day as it used to be with Alexander, if the song be faithful, "Never ending, still beginning; fighting still, and still destroying." No man surely was ever more blind to his destiny than I was when I last wrote to you from the woods of Alameira. The army marched almost immediately after. I wrote to Henry from Castel de Vide, and told him my next letter to you should be from Castel Branco; but soldiers' vows, in these situations, are commonly as false as dicers' oaths, and I hope Jove treats them as he does lovers' perjuries, at which, they say, "he laughs."

You will observe I have taken some pains at the top of my letter to furnish you with the means of discovering where we are. We have been several days in this neighbourhood. The care of the Alentejo is left to its old defenders, General Hill and the 2nd Division. With the exception of this and some Portuguese and cavalry, the whole army is assembled in this point-part investing Rodrigo, and the remainder covering the operation.

The French are at Plasencia. Between this and Rodrigo runs the strong chain of mountains separating Estremadura

from Castile, called in this part Sierra de Gata, and higher up Sierra and Peña de Françia. We are posted immediately behind this Sierra, and all the passes through it leading from Plasencia and Coria to Rodrigo are committed to our charge.

I have been very busy in exploring since we came here, and my work is not half over yet. I should have continued it to-day had I not hurt my foot yesterday on horseback, and am inclined to indulge it in a day's rest. Each of these passes is a Thermopyla. The French reconnoitred the heads of them yesterday with a strong party of infantry and cavalry; did some mischief in the villages below the mountain, and caught some of us napping. (They cannot force us here while we are awake.) Rodrigo is weakly garrisoned, and I should think would fall to us soon.

Think of my meeting the other day, quite by accident, with Don Carlos. He was passing through the town we had just marched into on his way to take the command in Old Castile. He is quite recovered from his wound, and I was not a little proud to find that he recollected immediately not only myself but my name, the moment I presented myself before him. A year's separation after so short an acquaintance generally obliterates at least one from the memory. He has given me a thousand commissions to perform for him in England, all of which I engaged to do, and none of which I shall perhaps be able to accomplish. However, I have already shown every disposition to end well, for I have begun by losing the memorandum he left with me, and must write to him immediately for another.

. . . You will be glad to hear that my friend Godwin is recovering the use of his hand by degrees. I receive lefthanded letters from him as often as he can write them, for his right hand as yet is unequal to its office; and to tell you the truth, as I have already told himself, if his penmanship were the only consideration, I should not care how long it continued so, for he writes better to me with his left hand than ever he did with his right, for although he has it better under control than anyone I have ever seen write left handed who expected

to recover the use of the right, he has not sufficient command over it yet to take liberties. . . .

'Payo: September 1, 1811.

'I have just accomplished the impossible. I have written a letter to General Brownrigg, begging him to get me a majority in one way or the other before he leaves England, corrected and revised till it is as clear of passion and as full of hard words as ever letter of the kind was written by the most indifferent of suitors to the most indifferent of patrons; and I have the vanity to think it equal to any of those models that are published by our literati for the assistance of the unlearned, whenever it should be their chance to fall into difficult situations. I wish it all the success it deserves.

'I sat down the other day to tell you that we were still upon our mountain throne, without a chance of being dislodged either by friend or foe. Since this we have certain accounts of Marmont's marching upon Salamanca from Plasencia; and I believe about this time his army is collected there. He can intend nothing against us, nor interrupt our proceedings against Rodrigo without considerable reinforcement. We hear it is coming, with the Emperor at its head. You know more of this than I do, for I promise you this last report we get from England.

Since I wrote to you last I have been Lavaterising the face of this country, and find plenty of character in it. It was evidently made for the giants, and since they were disinherited it has not been much frequented. We little people feel as if we had no business here. Not one of the six or seven passes that I have explored (conscious all the time of my unworthiness) but has a character peculiar to itself. Sometimes you ascend to the head of the mountain, which always rises gradually on our side, and look over on what seems an unfinished part of the world—so vast and shapeless everything appears. If you descend, though by very safe roads, you wind round precipices that it is not prudent to look in the face before breakfast or after dinner (unless it be as ladies dine); and further on you cross chasms which the giants might have

bestridden with perfect ease to themselves, but over which bridges have been flung since they vacated their seats, and these points are not uninteresting to those who have to defend them against attacks from persons of as small dimensions as themselves. Looking up after having got so far, you see a hundred rocks hanging over you that I suppose have been stationary from the beginning of time-certainly since the days of the giants; but they look so very black and menacing that I believe no one has ever passed under them without feeling convinced that they only waited for his arrival to put themselves in motion. Our alarms make us very vain at times, but I believe this is one of the few instances in which we do not feel mortified at finding that we overrated our importance. There are wolves here too, but I never encountered one; and if the veracity of grave men were to be questioned, I should be tempted to suspect that a wolf was as inseparable from the story of a mountain as a fairy used to be from that of a dell or river-bank. On other sides the scene is quite different. You have cultivated landscape beneath as extensive as your eyes can carry you, and the moment you begin to descend you lose sight of it in a forest of large branching chestnut trees reaching to the foot of the mountain, where there are situated a number of populous and pleasant villages, rich at this moment in wines and all sorts of fruit. Here, too, there are bridges to cross, but of a more genteel description; and the rocks are so dressed out with laurel, arbutus, and myrtle, and all sorts of green things, that there is nothing terrific in them, but rather it would seem a pleasure to be tumbled upon by such well-graced monsters. Sometimes there is a "silent valley," such as Milton's fallen angels retired into, and sang. It would be quite big enough to hold them all, even though Satan, as he is described, should be taken as the standard of measurement for each. You see how naturally a quartermaster-general sets about portioning off ground before he is aware of it. Yet I believe I have looked at these scenes oftener as an amateur than as a soldier in the course of my rambles. The highest point of the mountain they call Xalama,