ether in the dry bed of a stream, which made
the demarcation of the armies. It was wine he wanted, of which we had a
good provision, and the English had quite run out. He gave me the money,
and I, as was the custom, left him my firelock in pledge, and set off
for the canteen. When I returned with a skin of wine, behold, it had
pleased some uneasy devil of an English officer to withdraw the
outposts! Here was a situation with a vengeance, and I looked for
nothing but ridicule in the present and punishment in the future.
Doubtless our officers winked pretty hard at this interchange of
courtesies, but doubtless it would be impossible to wink at so gross a
fault, or rather so pitiable a misadventure as mine; and you are to
conceive me wandering in the plains of Castile, benighted, charged with
a wine-skin for which I had no use, and with no knowledge whatever of
the whereabouts of my musket, beyond that it was somewhere in my Lord
Wellington's army. But my Englishman was either a very honest fellow, or
else extremely thirsty, and at last contrived to advertise me of his new
position. Now, the English sentry in Castile and the wounded hero in the
Durham public-house were one and the same person; and if he had been a
little less drunk, or myself less lively in getting away, the travels of
M. St. Ives might have come to an untimely end.

I suppose this woke me up; it stirred in me besides a spirit of
opposition, and in spite of cold, darkness, the highwaymen and the
footpads, I determined to walk right on till breakfast-time: a happy
resolution, which enabled me to observe one of those traits of manners
which at once depict a country and condemn it. It was near midnight when
I saw, a great way ahead of me, the light of many torches; presently
after, the sound of wheels reached me, and the slow tread of feet, and
soon I had joined myself to the rear of a sordid, silent, and lugubrious
procession, such as we see in dreams. Close on a hundred persons marched
by torchlight in unbroken silence; and in their midst a cart, and in
the cart, on an inclined platform, the dead body of a man--the
centre-piece of this solemnity, the hero whose obsequies we were come
forth at this unusual hour to celebrate. It was but a plain, dingy old
fellow of fifty or sixty, his throat cut, his shirt turned over as
though to show the wound. Blue trousers and brown socks completed his
attire, if we can talk so of the dead. He had a horrid look of a
waxwo