joicing." When the British troops embarked at Bordeaux, for
America and England, a crowd of poor Spanish and Portuguese women, who
had long followed their fortunes and were now forbidden to accompany
their husbands and lovers, watched their departure with tearful eyes.
"They were fond and attached creatures, and had been useful in many
ways, and under many circumstances, not only to their husbands, but to
the corps they belonged to generally. Many of them, the Portuguese in
particular, had lived with our men for years, and had borne them
children." But the stern rules of the service prevailed. The battalions
bound for America were allowed but a limited number of soldiers' wives,
and the surplus were of necessity left to their fate. Some had money;
more were penniless, and nearly naked. Men and officers were then
greatly in arrear, but nevertheless a subscription was got up, and its
amount divided amongst the unfortunates, thus abandoned upon a foreign
shore, and at many hundreds of miles from their homes.

General Picton was a man of action, not of words. There was no palaver
about him, nothing superfluous in the way of orations, but he spoke
strongly and to the point. Long harangues, as Mr Grattan justly
observes, are not necessary to British soldiers. Metaphor and flowers of
rhetoric are thrown away upon them. Something plain, pithy, and
appropriate is what they like; the shorter the better. "Rangers of
Connaught!" said Picton, as he passed the Eighty-eighth, drawn up for
the assault of Ciudad Rodrigo, "it is not my intention to expend any
powder this evening. We'll do this business with the cold iron." This
was a very unpretending speech; nothing of the clap-trap or melodramatic
about it; a mere declaration in the fewest possible words, of the
speaker's intentions, implying what he expected from those he addressed.
That it was just what was wanted, was proved by the hearty respondent
cheer of the brave Irishmen. The result of the attack is well known; the
Rangers took a gallant share in it. The next morning the troops were
ordered out of the captured town, which they had ransacked to some
purpose, and the Eighty-eighth, drawn up on their bivouac ground, were
about to march away to the village of Atalaya, when Picton again rode
past. "Some of the soldiers, who were more than usually elevated in
spirits," (they had passed the night in bursting open doors and drinking
brandy,) "called out, 'Well, General, we gave you a c