ommendations except a bigger share
of impudence than usual, could manage it; it would be aisy, indeed,
for a man like meself, with all the advantages of having lost an
arm in battle, to get round them."

There was a shout of laughter round the table, for O'Grady had, as
usual, spoken with an air of earnest simplicity, as if the
propositions he was laying down were beyond question.

"You must have had a weary time at Miranda, since you came back,
O'Connor," the colonel said, "with no one there but a wing of the
65th."

"I don't suppose they were to be pitied, colonel," Doctor
O'Flaherty laughed. "You may be sure that they kept Miranda lively,
in some way or other. Trust them for getting into mischief of some
sort."

"There is no saying what we might have done if we had, as you
suppose, been staying for the last two months at Miranda; but in
point of fact that has not been the case. We have been across the
frontier, and have been having a pretty lively time of it--at least
I have, for Dick has spent a month of it inside a French prison."

"What!" the major exclaimed, "were you with that force that has
been puzzling us all, and has been keeping the French in such hot
water that, as we hear, Marmont was obliged to give up his idea of
invading Portugal, and had to hurry off twenty thousand men, to
save Salamanca and Valladolid from being captured? Nobody has been
able to understand where the army sprung from, or how it was
composed. The general idea was that a division from England must
have landed, at either Oporto or Vigo, or that it must have been
brought round from Sicily; for none of our letters or papers said a
word about any large force having sailed from England. Not a soul
seemed to know anything about it. I know a man on Crawford's staff,
and he assured me that none of them were in the secret.

"A French officer, who was brought in a prisoner a few days since,
put their numbers down at twenty-five thousand, at least;
including, he said, a large guerilla force. He said that Zamora had
been cut off for a long time, that the country had been ravaged,
and posts captured almost at the gates of Salamanca; and that
communications had been interrupted, and large convoys captured
between Burgos and Valladolid; and that one column, five thousand
strong, had been very severely mauled, and forced to fall back.
This confirmed the statements that we had before heard, from the
peasantry and the French deserters. Now ther