I was thus employed--having carefully washed her feet, and, by means of a brush, made her coat smooth and sleek--when the count, attended by his intrepreter, came out into the yard. He was prodigiously struck with the change of appearance which my careful grooming had created in his favourite; but I thought that he looked anxious, too, and I was not long kept in ignorance as to the cause.

"Is it your custom in England," demanded the interpreter, "to strip to the skin when you work? Oar master is fearful lest you should catch cold, and begs that you will think of yourself."

I replied to this inquiry, as the real state of the case required, by explaining that I stood in nature's garb for the most obvious of all reasons,--namely, that I had not been master of a shirt since the day I was taken prisoner. Nothing could exceed the kindness and commiseration of the count when the statement was repeated to him. He sent the interpreter into the house for three of his own shirts, which he gave to me. He then presented me with a louis-d'or, and desired that, so soon as I should have completed my job, I would first refresh myself from the cook's larder, and then go and make such purchases as the state of my wardrobe might render necessary. It is scarcely worth while to add that orders so agreeable in themselves were to the minutest tittle attended to. I ate a hearty luncheon, refreshed myself by bathing in the Douro, put on one of my new shirts, and walked forth a prouder and a happier man than I had been for many a day. The next hour saw me in possession of a silk handkerchief for my neck, of four of a like texture for my pocket, of several pairs of stockings, and a hat; and, after all, I had silver enough left wherewith to treat Kruger to a good bottle of wine. In a word, my situation was as pleasant as it is possible for that of any man to be who feels that he is, after all, but a prisoner at large; and who receives at the hands of foreigners and strangers those marks of regard, which bring not with them their perfect value unless they come from our countrymen and our friends.

It is not worth while to describe how we continued our march, first to Valladolid, and afterwards to Salamanca. Pleasant excursions these were to me; for I rode my own horse, without having any other charge committed to me than to lead the E nglish mare, which was my master's especial favourite; and not unfrequently my master himself rode by my side, and, through the interpreter, conversed with me. With respect to our living, that was of the best; and we invariably made choice of some beautiful glade or covert in which to eat our noonday meal. Moreover, in Salamanca I was measured for two entire suits of clothes; to convey which, as well as the rest of my wardrobe, a portmanteau was given to me. No man in my situation could, indeed, be more entirely comfortable; nor was I left without evidence that to others I was become the object of something like envy. But that is a misfortune from which I greatly fear that no successful candidate for advancement, in any situation of life, is free. Take the lead of your fellows, ever so slightly, and they may seem for a while to admire,--go on, heading them more and more, and they soon come to hate. So much for human nature.

We remained in Salamanca a considerable space of time; of which I did not fail to take advantage, by visiting every object in that celebrated seat of learning which was described to me as worth the attention of a stranger. Of the general effect of the city, as it is first seen at a distance, with its endless spires, towers, and domes, I need not say much. The traveller, if he approach it while the rays of the setting sun light up its gilded cupolas, finds himself almost involuntarily led into the delusion that the home of some oriental prince is near at hand; and though the idea may wear out before the lower gate is passed, it is succeeded by others scarcely more familiar. For Salamanca, at least when I resided in it, resembled no other city which I have visited even in Spain. Its colleges were then in their integrity,--its cathedral, pure and graceful in its architecture, uninjured; and even the dwelling-houses, which adjoined to the old Moorish walls, and overlooked, by their narrow casements, the battlements which surrounded them, had a character so peculiarly their own, that I find myself entirely incapable of describing it.

With respect again to the inhabitants, these struck me as having even more than the accustomed allowance of Spanish indolence about them. Salamanca cannot have been, at any period, a place of great trade. Like Oxford and Cambridge among ourselves, it is overhung by an atmosphere of academic abstraction; yet we naturally expect to find, where shops are abundant, some display of the spirit of barter, and neither in Oxford nor Cambridge are we disappointed. But in Salamanca the whole world seems asleep. You walk abroad in the middle of the day, and the streets are empty; you go forth in the cool of the evening to be met by hidalgos wrapped up in their cloaks, who, unwashed and unshaven, lounge from point to point, as if the act of moving were a labour all but insupportable. And then again for the women. They may have been better than the men; I verily believe that they were; but in the matter of dress, never have Eve's daughters so striven to disfigure themselves. Their long thin waists contrasted singularly with a degree of fulness both above and below, which quite surprised me; and their movements were, in consequence, such as might be expected, altogether ungraceful. I confess that I do not retain any pleasant remembrance of a city, which in its architectural arrangements presents a thousand beautiful features, and in which, as far as my own personal case was concerned, I had every motive for being satisfied with my residence.

In a place thus miserably circumstanced, it will not surprise the reader to be told, that I met with few adventures which made strong demands upon my interest. One, indeed, if such it deserve to be termed, I may be permitted to describe; even though the results were to allect me with no very pleasing ideas of the Spanish character, as connected with one of the most solemn acts in which rational creatures can take part.

I remember one day strolling into the cathedral, where I was greatly struck by the progress of a funeral ceremony, which had only just begun. The corpse was that of a young woman of some rank, which lay in its last robes upon a sort of platform in the middle of the chancel,--pale, and with the long black hair gathered in braids over the forehead. She was somewhat gorgeously arrayed; had a jewelled ring upon one of her fingers--possibly the gift of a betrothed,--and a golden crucifix suspended from her neck, while earrings, also of gold, were in her ears, and a brilliant clasped, or seemed to clasp, the band upon her brow. I did not get sufficiently near to judge of her beauty; but, as far as a cursory examination will enable me to speak, I should say that her features were regular; and that there was a soft, sweet, gentle expression in her sunken features.

The corpse, when I entered the church, seemed to have been just conveyed to its temporary resting-place--a platform, on which the black bier was laid. It had scarce settled down, if I may so express myself, when certain vergers approached, and enveloped it, all below the waist, in a black velvet pall, while a body of priests performed mass at the high altar, and a crowd of Carthusian friars sang a requiem for the dead with great effect. Innumerable wax candles burned both at the head and at the feet of the deceased. Her maid was in attendance beside them; and the rapidity with which she crossed herself--lighting and extinguishing from time to time her own taper--seemed to indicate that she took a deep and solemn interest in the ceremony. Meanwhile, the grave, which had been prepared near one of the smaller altars, stood open; and by-and-by a monk, bearing a huge black crucifix in his hand, approached it. This he planted at the head of the orifice; and, as if his doing so had been the signal that all was ready, a huge, muscular, large-headed man, dressed in the ordinary attire of a workman, and probably the gravedigger, approached the bier. The music, suddenly ceased--the masses were ended--and that barbarian seized the corpse, which, without regard even to the semblance of decency, he threw up, as if it had been a bundle of rags, into his arms. He bore it thus across the aisle, and, descending with it into the grave, laid it in the coffin, which yawned at the bottom of the hole. But his business did not end there--the monster suddenly thrust up his arm, and drew towards him, first, the lid of the coffin, and next the black pall, with which he entirely shrowded both himself and his future proceedings; it is therefore impossible for me to say what he might have done during the half hour that he lingered in the grave; but I own that my imagination turned towards the jewels and the golden crucifix, none of which could I conceive it probable that he would leave to be devoured by the tomb. Nor was this the only transaction that disgusted me in the winding up of what, in its commencement, was an exceedingly striking ceremony. No sooner was the dead body removed out of sight, and the candles that stood beside the bier extinguished, than a spirit of extreme levity appeared to take possession of all whom the building contained. I heard the murmur of a light, and, as it seemed, a frivolous conversation pass through the crowd, while laughter, scarcely suppressed, told where each joke had taken effect, and spoke very little in favour either of them who uttered or of those who received it. Perhaps it might be prejudice on my part, but I own that I was thoroughly disgusted. I turned away, and walked home, not without a conviction that, after all, there is more of real sublimity in the simple and affecting burial service of my own church than in all the mummery of masses and requiems with which the feelings of the heart seemed to be quite at discord.

Nothing could exceed the total disregard exhibited by the French for every thing which a Christian people are apt to consider sacred. Of the churches in Salamanca very many had been converted by them into barracks, and even into stables. In the former, you might see bands of soldiers cooking their provisions over fires, which they had lighted on the paved floors of the very altar-places, and fed with gilded wood, broken from the altars themselves. The smoke, of course, having no outlet except the doors and windows, rose and curled about the Gothic pillars, blackening the walls, and defiling the carved work with which the roofs were ornamented; while the loud laugh, the coarse wit, and coarser song, sounded peculiarly hideous in a place whence the voice of prayer and praise might alone be expected to proceed. But if the churches in which the infantry had quarters were hideous, a thousandfold more disgusting was the spectacle presented by those into which corps of cavalry had been thrust. There, not the men only, but the horses, defiled God's house, in a manner, to look back upon which makes me shudder. The floors lay a foot deep in manure and litter: the marble pavements were beaten into fragments by the hoofs of the animals. No care was taken to preserve the brass monuments, which, in one church in particular, must have been, a short while previously, both numerous and singularly beautiful; while into the very stone walls rings seemed to have been driven, to which, here and there, a brute more restive than the others was tied up.

They whose thoughts are continually turned towards the field of battle or the toilsome march, draw for themselves but an imperfect representation of the horrors that attend a state of warfare. It is when armies force their way into the haunts of civilized life,--when soldiers and citizens become incongruously huddled together,--when armed bands, that are accustomed to the touch of deadly weapons, stretch themselves forth to commit havoc,--and domicile and fane, and temple and town-hall, are alike polluted by the sounds and sights that appertain only to the camp--then it is that war offers to the gaze of the looker-on its most hideous features; and our visions of glory, and renown, and high prowess, are all obscured by the contemplation of suffering and much wrong. I freely confess, that I used to pass these desecrated churches by in a frame of mind quite unbecoming the occasion. I said to myself, over and over again, "The miscreants who thus defile the temples of the Living God do not deserve to triumph, and triumph they assuredly will not."

There was a very large French force at this time in and around Salamanca,--according to their own account, at least seventy-five thousand men. It had been collected for some time, for the avowed purpose of driving the English into the sea; and now preparations were made for the immediate accomplishment of this much-desired object. Of these, while they were going on, I saw, of course, very little; though the extra work performed in all the bakehouses did not escape me. But by-and-by the truth came out, and the count himself disclosed it.

"We march to-morrow," said he, one morning to me, "on an expedition from which I, for one, augur no good. We are going to advance towards Lisbon; and, the better to ensure celerity for our movements, all our baggage is to be left behind. We shall carry nothing with us, either on the men's backs or by the cars except twelve days' provisions; and, before these are expended, your countrymen, it is assumed will be driven to their ships. But, as I greatly doubt the issue, I don't mean to take you along with me. Remain where you are; take good care of the horses; and, depend upon it that, ere many days pass, we shall meet again."

I thanked my master for the consideration which induced him to screen me from the disgrace of even following in the train of an armed force which was going to march against my countrymen; and determined that, as far as diligence and care on my part could avert the evil, he should find no reason to complain that his horses had been neglected.

The prediction which Count Golstein ventured to make ere the march began was verified to the letter. I saw the columns of infantry and cavalry defile from Salamanca, with all the pomp and circumstance of war.

The horses were in good condition,--the men fresh, well-appointed, and in excellent spirits. The bands of the several regiments played favourite airs, and flags and banners floated to the breeze,--for the movement was begun with extraordinary magnificence. How different was the order of their return! In an inconceivably short space of time they came back, crest-fallen and dejected, having suffered quite as much from the lack of provisions and forage as from the sword; for the system adopted during the first retreat to Torres Vedras was still rigidly acted up to. Every town and village was deserted on the approach of the French,--every morsel of bread carried away,--every animal removed, or else slaughtered; while the very corn in the fields was set on fire and consumed in order to prevent it from falling into the enemy's hands. The consequence was, that each league which they traversed in advance served but to involve them in deeper difficulties; and, long ere the twelve days were expired, on which they had counted as securing a triumph, both leaders and followers saw that the case was desperate.

The historian has recorded in what manner the retreat to Salamanca was conducted. Horses died by scores--men foundered, and were taken or put to death by the peasantry, guns and carriages were abandoned at every pass. There was distress and anxiety everywhere. I shall never forget the soil-stained and demoralized appearance which the different regiments presented when once more they entered the town. The spirits, too, and tempers of all ranks were broken; and they seemed ripe for almost any species of outrage.

"I told you how it would be," exclaimed my master; "I was sure that evil would come of it. Your countrymen are as obstinate as the rocks on which they have planted themselves. They have handled us very roughly; neither have I, in my own proper person, come of scot-free. That scoundrel, Kruger, has deserted with one of my best horses, and a portmanteau filled with some of the most valuable portions of my wardrobe. However, here we are; and we must make the most of it. How does the mare go on?"