oming many a heart had throbbed, and many a bosom beat high.
From Ciudad Rodrigo to the frontier our way led through the scenes of
former glory; and if the veterans of the army exulted at once again
beholding the battlefields where victory had crowned their arms, the
new soldiers glowed with ambition to emulate their fame. As for myself,
short as the period had been since I quitted England, I felt that my
character had undergone a very great change; the wandering fancies of
the boy had sobered down into the more fixed, determined passions of the
man. The more I thought of the inglorious indolence of my former life,
the stronger was now my desire to deserve a higher reputation than
that of a mere lounger about a court, the military accompaniment of a
pageant. Happily for me, I knew not at the time how few opportunities
for distinction are afforded by the humble position of a subaltern; how
seldom occasions arise where, amid the mass around him, his name can win
praise or honour. I knew not this; and my reverie by day, my dream by
night, presented but one image--that of some bold, successful deed, by
which I should be honourably known and proudly mentioned, or my death be
that of a brave soldier in the field of glory.

It may be remembered by my reader that in the celebrated march by which
Wellington opened that campaign whose result was the expulsion of the
French armies from the Peninsula, the British left, under the command
of Graham, was always in advance of the main body. Their route traversed
the wild and dreary passes of the Tras-os-Montes, a vast expanse of
country, with scarcely a road to be met with, and but few inhabitants;
the solitary glens and gloomy valleys, whose echoes had waked to no
other sounds save those of the wild heron or the eagle, were now to
resound with the thundering roll of artillery waggons, the clanking
crash of cavalry columns, or the monotonous din of the infantry
battalions, as from sunrise to sunset they poured along--now scaling the
rugged height of some bold mountain, now disappearing among the wooded
depths of some dark ravine.

Owing to a temporary appointment on the staff, I was continually passing
and repassing between this portion of the army and the force under the
immediate command of Lord Wellington. Starting at daybreak, I have set
off alone through these wild untravelled tracts, where mountains rose in
solemn grandeur, their dark sides wooded with the gloomy cork-tree, or
r