shop. We arrived
and were allowed to enter the town, where I assisted the vine-dresser
in handling the heavy wine skins, while his brother posted off to
headquarters and returned after an hour with the marshal's protection.
Armed with this, he led me off to the shop, found it undamaged, helped
me to take down the shutters, showed me his cupboards, tools, and
stock in trade, and answered my rudimentary questions in the art of
compounding drugs--in a twitter all the while to be gone. Nor did I
seek to delay him (for if my plans miscarried, Sabugal would assuredly
be no place for him). Late in the afternoon he left me and went off
in search of his brother, and I fell to stropping my razors with what
cheerfulness I could assume.

Before nightfall my neighbours on either hand had looked in and given
me good evening. They asked few questions when I told them I was
taking over old Diego's business for the time, and kept their
speculations to themselves. I lay down to sleep that night with a
lighter heart.

The adventure itself tickled my humour, though I had no opinion at
all of the design--Trant's design--which lay at the end of it. This,
however, did not damp my zeal in using eyes and ears; and on the third
afternoon, when the old vine-dresser rode over with more wine skins,
and dropped in to inquire about business and take home a pint of
rhubarb for the stomach-ache, I had the satisfaction of making up for
him, under the eyes of two soldiers waiting to be shaved, a packet
containing a compendious account of Marmont's dispositions with a
description of his headquarters. My report concluded with these
words:--

"_With regard to the enterprise on which I have had the honour to be
consulted I offer my opinion with humility. It is, however, a fixed
one. You will lose two divisions; and even a third, should you bring
it._"

On the whole I had weathered through these three days with eminent
success. The shaving I managed with something like credit (for a
Portuguese). My pharmaceutics had been (it was vain to deny) in the
highest degree empirical, but if my patients had not been cured they
even more certainly had not died--or at least their bodies had not
been found. What gravelled me was the phlebotomy. Somehow the chance
of being called upon to let blood had not occurred to me, and on the
second morning when a varicose sergeant of the line dropped into
my operating chair and demanded to have a vein opened, I bitterly
regr