Early this morning our division moved still farther to its right, and our brigade led the way across a ford, which took us up to the middle; while the balls from the enemy's advanced posts were hissing in the water around us, we drove in their light troops and commenced a furious assault upon their main body. Thus far all was right; but a thick drizzling rain now came on, in consequence of which the third division, which was to have made a simultaneous attack to our left, missed their way, and a brigade of dragoons under Sir William Erskine, who were to have covered our right, went the Lord knows where, but certainly not into the fight, although they started at the same time that we did, and had the music of our rifles to guide them; and even the second brigade of our own division could not afford us any support for nearly an hour, so that we were thus unconsciously left with about fifteen hundred men in the very impertinent attempt to carry a formidable position on which stood as many thousands.
    The weather, which had deprived us of the aid of our friends, favoured us so far as to prevent the enemy from seeing the amount of our paltry force; and the conduct of our gallant fellows, led on by Sir Sidney Beckwith, was so truly heroic that, incredible as it may seem, we had the best of the fight throughout. Our first attack was met by such overwhelming numbers that we were forced back and followed by three heavy columns, before which we retired slowly, and keeping up a destructive fire, to the nearest rising ground, where we reformed and instantly charged their advancing masses, sending them flying at the point of the bayonet and entering their position along with them, where we were assailed by fresh forces. Three times did the very same thing occur. In our third attempt we got possession of one of their howitzers, for which a desperate struggle was making, when we were at the same moment charged by infantry in front and cavalry on the right, and again compelled to fall back; but fortunately at this moment we were reinforced by the arrival of the second brigade, and with their aid we once more stormed their position and secured the well-earned howitzer, while the third division came at the same time upon their flank and they were driven from the field in the greatest disorder.
    Lord Wellington's despatch on this occasion did ample justice to Sir Sidney Beckwith and his brave brigade. Never were troops more judiciously or more gallantly led. Never was a leader more devotedly followed.
    In the course of the action a man of the name of Knight fell dead at my feet, and though I heard a musket ball strike him, I could neither find blood nor wound.
    There was a little spaniel belonging to one of our officers running about the whole time, barking at the balls, and I saw him once smelling at a live shell, which exploded in his face without hurting him.
    The strife had scarcely ended among mortals when it was taken up by the elements with terrific violence. The Scotch mist of the morning had now increased to torrents, enough to cool the fever of our late excitement, and accompanied by thunder and lightning. As a compliment for our exertions in the fight we were sent into the town and had the advantage of whatever cover its dilapidated state afforded. While those who had not had the chance of getting broken skins had now the benefit of sleeping in wet ones.
    On the 5th of April we entered the frontiers of Spain and slept in a bed for the first time since I left the ship. Passing from the Portuguese to the Spanish frontier is about equal to taking one step from the coal-hole into the parlour, for the cottages on the former are reared with filth, furnished with ditto, and peopled accordingly; whereas those of Spain, even within the same mile, are neatly whitewashed, both without and within, and the poorest of them can furnish a good bed, with clean linen, and the pillow-cases neatly adorned with pink and skyblue ribbons, while their dear little girls look smiling and neat as their pillow-cases.
    After the action at Sabugal the enemy retired to the neighbourhood of Ciudad Rodrigo without our getting another look at them, and we took up the line of the Agueda and Axava rivers, for the blockade of the fortress of Almeida, in which they had left a garrison indifferently provisioned.
    The garrison had no means of providing for their cattle but by turning them out to graze upon the glacis; and we sent a few of our rifles to practice against them, which very soon reduced them to salt provisions.
Towards the end of April the French army began to assemble on the opposite bank of the Agueda to attempt the relief of the garrison, while ours began to assemble in position at Fuentes D'Onor to dispute it.
    Our division still continued to hold the same line of outposts, and had several sharp affairs between the piquets at the bridge of Marialva.
    As a general action seemed now to be inevitable, we anxiously longed for the return of Lord Wellington, who had been suddenly called to the corps of the army under Marshal Beresford near Badajoz, as we would rather see his long nose in the fight than a reinforcement of ten thousand men any day. Indeed, there was a charm not only about himself but all connected with him for which no odds could compensate. The known abilities of Sir George Murray, the gallant bearing of the lamented Pakenham, of Lord Fitzroy Somerset, of the present Duke of Richmond, Sir Colin Campbell, with others the flower of our young nobility and gentry, who, under the auspices of such a chief, seemed always a group attendant on victory and I'll venture to say that there was not a bosom in that army that did not beat more lightly when heard the joyful news of his arrival the day before the enemy's advance.
    He had ordered us not to dispute the passage of the river, so that when the French army advanced on the morning of the 3d of May we retired slowly before them across the plains of Espeja and drew into the position where the whole army was now assembled. Our division took post in reserve, in the left centre. Towards evening the enemy made a fierce attack on the village of Fuentes, but were repulsed with loss.
    On the 4th both armies looked at each other all day without exchanging shots.

The day began to dawn, this fine May morning, with a rattling fire of musketry on the extreme right of our position, which the enemy had attacked, and to which point our division was rapidly moved.
    Our battalion was thrown into a wood, a little to the left and front of the division engaged, and was instantly warmly opposed to the French skirmishers in the course of which I was struck with a musket-ball on the left breast, which made me stagger a yard or two backward, and, as I felt no pain, I concluded that I was dangerously wounded but it turned out to be owing to my not being hurt. While our operations here were confined to a tame skirmish, and our view to the oaks with which we were mingled, we found, by the evidence of our ears, that the division which we had come to support was involved in a more serious onset, for there was the successive rattle of artillery, the wild hurrah of charging squadrons and the repulsing volley of musketry until Lord Wellington, finding his right too much extended, directed that division to fall back behind the small river Touronne and ours to join the main body of the army. The execution of our movement presented a magnificent military spectacle, as the plain between us and the right of the army was by this time in possession of the French cavalry, and, while we were retiring through it with the order and precision of a common field-day, they kept dancing around us and every instant threatening a charge without daring to execute it.
    We took up our new position at a right angle with the then right of the British line, on which our left rested, and with our right on the Touronne. The enemy followed our movement with a heavy column of infantry; but when they came near enough to exchange shots they did not seem to like our looks, as we occupied a low ridge of broken rocks against which even a rat could scarcely have hoped to advance alive; and they again fell back, and opening a tremendous fire of artillery, which was returned by a battery of our guns. In the course of a short time, seeing no further demonstration against this part of the position, our division was withdrawn and placed in reserve in rear of the centre.
    The battle continued to rage with fury in and about the village, whilst we were lying by our arms under a burning hot sun, some stray cannon-shot passing over and about us, whose progress we watched for want of other employment. One of them bounded along in the direction of an amateur*, whom we had for some time been observing securely placed, as he imagined, behind a piece of rock, which stood about five feet above the ground, and over which nothing but his head was shown, sheltered from the sun by an umbrella. The shot in question touched the ground three or four times between us and him; he saw it coming — lowered his umbrella and withdrew his head. Its expiring bound carried it into the very spot where he had that instant disappeared. I hope he was not hurt; but the thing looked so ridiculous that it excited a shout of laughter and we saw no more of him.
    A little before dusk, in the evening, our battalion was ordered forward to relieve the troops engaged in the village, part of which still remained in possession of the enemy, and I saw, by the mixed nature of the dead, in every part of the streets, that it had been successively in possession of both sides. The firing ceased with the daylight and I was sent, with a section of men, in charge of one of the streets for the night. There was a wounded serjeant of highlanders lying on my post. A ball had passed through the back part of his head, from which the brain was oozing, and his only sign of life was a convulsive hiccough every two or three seconds. I sent for a medical friend to look at him, who told me that he could not survive; I then got a mattress from the nearest house, placed the poor fellow on it, and made use of one corner as a pillow for myself, on which, after the fatigues of the day, and though called occasionally to visit my sentries, I slept most soundly. The highlander died in the course of the night.
    When we stood to our arms at daybreak next morning we found the enemy busy throwing up a six-gun battery immediately in front of our company's post, and we immediately set to work with our whole hearts and souls and placed a wall about twelve feet thick between us, which no doubt still remains there in the same garden as a monument of what can be effected in a few minutes by a hundred modern men when their personal safety is concerned; not but that the proprietor, in the midst of his admiration, would rather see a good bed of garlic on the spot, manured with the bodies of the architects.
    When the sun began to shine on the pacific disposition of the enemy, we proceeded to consign the dead to their last earthly mansions, giving every Englishman a grave to himself, and putting as many Frenchmen into one as it could conveniently accommodate. Whilst in the superintendence of this melancholy duty, and ruminating on the words of the poet:—

"There's not a form of all that lie
Thus ghastly, wild and bare,
Tost, bleeding, in the stormy sky,
Black in the burning air,
But to his knee some infant clung,
But on his heart some fond heart hung!"

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