st be on purpose you did it. Anyone may get
taken prisoner once; but when it happens twice, it begins to look
as if he was fonder of French rations than of French guns."

"I didn't think of it in that light, O'Grady; but now you put it
so, I will try and not get caught for the third time."

"We heard of your return, of course, and that you had gone straight
with your regiment to Miranda. We had a line from Dicky, the day
before he started; and mighty unkind we have thought it that neither
of you have sent us a word since then, and you with nothing to do at
all, at all; while we have been marching and countermarching, now
here and now there, now backwards and now forwards, ever since
Fuentes d'Onoro, till one's legs were ready to drop off one."

"Give someone else a chance to put in a word, O'Grady," the colonel
said. "Here we are, all dying to know how O'Connor slipped through
the hands of the French again; and sorra a word can anyone get in,
when your tongue is once loosened. If you are not quiet, I will
take him away with me to my own quarters; and just ask two or three
men, who know how to hold their tongue, to come up and listen to
his story."

"I will be as silent as a mouse, colonel dear," O'Grady said,
humbly; "though I would point out that O'Connor, being a colonel
like yourself, and in no way under your orders, might take it into
his head to prefer to stop with us here, instead of going with you.

"Now, Terence, we are all waiting for your story. Why don't you go
on?"

"Because, as you see, I am hard at work eating, just at present. We
have marched twenty miles this morning, with nothing but a crust of
bread at starting; and the story will keep much better than
luncheon."

Terence did not hurry himself over his meal but, when he had
finished, he gave them particulars of his escape from Salamanca,
his journey down to Cadiz, and then round by Lisbon.

"I thought there would be a woman in it, Terence," O'Grady
exclaimed. "With a soft tongue, and a presentable sort of face, and
impudence enough for a whole regiment, it was aisy for you to put
the comhether on a poor Spanish girl, who had never had the good
luck to meet an officer of the Mayo Fusiliers before. Sure, I have
always said to meself that, if I was ever taken prisoner, it would
not be long before some good-looking girl would take a fancy to me,
and get me out of the French clutches. Sure, if a young fellow like
yourself, without any special rec