t friendly relations with each other. Barter sprang up
between them, a regular code of signals was established, friendly
offices were exchanged. Wellington on one occasion desired to
reconnoitre Soult's camp from the top of a hill occupied by a French
picket, and ordered some English rifles to drive them off. No firing
was necessary. An English soldier held up the butt of his rifle and
tapped it in a peculiar way. The signal meant, "We must have the hill
for a short time," and the French at once retired. A steady traffic in
brandy and tobacco sprang up between the pickets of the two armies. A
rivulet at one point flowed between the outposts, and an Irish soldier
named Patten, on sentry there, placed a canteen with a silver coin in
it on a stone by the bank of the rivulet, to be filled with brandy by
the French in the usual way. Canteen and coin vanished, but no brandy
arrived. Patten, a daring fellow, regarded himself as cheated, and the
next day seeing, as he supposed, the same French sentry on duty, he
crossed the rivulet, seized the Frenchman's musket, shook the amazed
sentry out of his accoutrements as a pea is shaken out of its pod, and
carried them off. The French outposts sent in a flag of truce,
complained of this treatment, and said the unfortunate sentry's life
would be forfeited unless his uniform and gun were restored. Patten,
however, insisted that he held these "in pawn for a canteen of brandy,"
and he got his canteen before the uniform was restored.

On February 12 a white hard frost suddenly fell on the whole field of
operations, and turned the viscid mud everywhere to the hardness of
stone. The men could march, the artillery move; and Wellington, whose
strategy was ripe, was at once in action.

Soult barred his path by a great entrenched camp at Bayonne, to which
the Adour served as a Titanic wet ditch. The Adour is a great river,
swift and broad--swiftest and broadest through the six miles of its
course below the town to its mouth. Its bed is of shifting sand; the
spring-tide rises in it fourteen feet, the ebb-tide runs seven miles an
hour. Where the swift river and the great rollers of the Bay of Biscay
meet is a treacherous bar--in heavy weather a mere tumult of leaping
foam. Soult assumed that Wellington would cross the river above the
town; the attempt to cross it near the mouth, where it was barred with
sand, and beaten with surges, and guarded, too, by a tiny squadron of
French g