and parted the best friends imaginable.

I had hardly quitted him, at least I had not reached my station on the top of the hill, when I heard myself called by one of the sentinels, and turned round. I saw the individual with whom I had been conversing sitting in the midst of a little group of French officers, and watching the progress of an old woman who was coming towards our lines. She held a large bottle in her hand, which she lifted up to attract my notice, and continued to move forward, gabbling loudly all the while. Obeying her signal, I returned, and met her a few yards in front of the sentries, when she delivered to me about a couple of quarts of brandy as a present from the French officers; who had desired her to say, that if I could spare them a little tea in exchange, they would feel obliged. It so happened that I had brought no such luxury as tea to my post. Of this I informed the female Mercury, but I desired her to offer my best acknowledgments to her employers, and to add, that I had sent to the rear in order to procure it. With this message she accordingly departed, having promised to keep in sight for at least half an hour, and to return as soon as I should make a sign that the tea had arrived.

My bugler made good haste, and soon returned with about a quarter of a pound of black tea, the half of the stock which remained in my canteen. In the meanwhile the French officers continued sitting together, and all rose when I waved my cap to their carrier. The old lady was not remiss in taking the hint. I handed over to her the little parcel, with numerous apologies for its tenuity; and I had the satisfaction to perceive, that, trifling as it was, it proved acceptable. The party pulled off their hats as an acknowledgment—I did the same; and we each departed to our respective

stations.

There is something extremely agreeable in carrying on hostilities after this fashion; yet the matter may be pushed too far. Towards the close of the war, indeed, so good an understanding prevailed between the outposts of the two armies, that Lord Wellington found it necessary to forbid all communication whatever; nor will the reader wonder at this, when

I state to him the reason. A field-officer, I shall not say in what part of the line, in going his rounds one night, found that the whole of the serjeant's picquet-guard had disappeared. He was, of course, both alarmed and surprised at the occurrence; but his alarm gave place to absolute astonishment, when, on stretching forward to observe whether there was any movement in the enemy's lines, he peeped into a cottage from which a noise of revelry was proceeding, and beheld the party sitting in the most sociable manner with a similar party of Frenchmen, and carousing jovially. As soon as he showed himself, his own men rose, and wishing their companions a good night, returned with the greatest sang-froid to their post. It is, however, but justice to add, that the sentinels on both sides faithfully kept their ground, and that no intention of deserting existed on either part. In fact, it was a sort of custom, the French and English guards visiting each other by turns.

At the period of which I have spoken above, however, no such extraordinary intimacy had begun. As yet we were merely civil towards one another; and even that degree of civility was for a while interrupted, by the surprisal of a French post by a detachment from General Beresford's division, on the river Nive. Not that the picquet was wantonly cut off, or that any blame could possibly attach to the general who ordered its surprisal. The fact was, that the outpost in question occupied a hill upon the allied bank of the stream. It was completely insulated and detached from all other French posts, and appeared to be held as much out of perverseness, as because it commanded a view of the British lines to a great extent. Lord Beresford had repeatedly dispatched flags of truce, to request that it might be withdrawn, expressing great unwillingness to violate the sacred character which had been tacitly conferred upon the picquets; but Soult was deaf to his entreaties, and replied to his threats, only by daring him to carry them into execution. A party was accordingly ordered out, one stormy night, to cut off the guard; and so successful was the attempt, that an officer and thirty soldiers, with a midshipman and a few seamen, who had charge of the boat by which the

reliefs were daily ferried over, were taken. Not a shot was fired. The French, trusting to the storm for protection, had called in their videttes, having only one on duty at the door of the house, and he found his arms pinioned, and himself secured, ere the roar of the tempest had permitted him to detect the sound of approaching steps. The unfortunate subaltern who commanded, sent in a few days after for his baggage; but the reply was, that the general would forward to him a halter, as the only indulgence which he merited.

But to return to my own personal narrative. After the adventure of the tea, nothing particular occurred whilst I continued in charge of the post. As soon as darkness had fairly set in, I proposed, in obedience to my orders, to withdraw; and I carried my design into execution without any molestation on the part of the enemy. It was, however, their custom to take possession of the hill as soon as the British troops abandoned it; and hence I had not proceeded above half way across the ravine, when I heard the voices of a French detachment, which must have marched into the court-yard of the house almost at the very moment when I and my men marched out of it. But they made no attempt to annoy us, and we rejoined the corps from which we had been detached, in perfect safety.

The next day was spent in a state of rest in the chateau of Arcanques. It is a fine old pile, and stands at the foot of the little eminence on which the church is built. Like many mansions in England of the date of Queen Elizabeth or Henry VIII., it is surrounded by a high wall; within which is a paved court, leading up to the main entrance. But it, too, like all the buildings near, bore ample testimony to the merciless operation of war, in its crumbling masonry and blackened timbers. There was a grove of venerable old firs round it, from which all the late firing had not entirely expelled a collection of rooks.

Of the church I have a less perfect recollection than I have of the chateau. I remember, indeed, that its situation was highly striking, and that the view from the church-yard was of no ordinary beauty. I recollect, like wise, several statues of knights and ladies reposing in niches round the

walls; some with the cross upon their shields, and their legs laid athwart, to show that they had served in Palestine, or belonged to the order of the Sepulchre; and others in the same ancient costume of chain armour. But whether they were worthy of admiration, as specimens of the art of sculpture, I cannot now take it upon me to declare. I remarked, however, that the devices on the shields of most of these warriors, and the crests upon their helmets, resembled the coat and crest which were emblazoned over the gateway of the chateau; and hence I concluded that they were the effigies of the former lords of the castle, and that the family which owned it must have been at one period of some consequence.

It was not, however, in examining these buildings alone that I found amusement for my hours of idleness. From the church-yard, as I have already stated, the view is at all times magnificent, and it was rendered doubly so to-day by the movements of our army. The tide of war seemed to have taken a sudden turn; and the numerous corps which had so lately defiled towards the right could now be seen retracing their steps, and deploying towards the left. It was a magnificent spectacle. From the high ground on which I stood I could see very nearly to the two extreme points of the position; and the effect produced by the marching of nearly 120,000 men, may be more easily imagined than described. The roads of communication ran, for the most part, in the rear of Arcanques. They were all crowded-cavalry, infantry, and artillery, were moving; some columns marching in eschellon, others pausing, from time to time, as if to watch some object in their front; whilst, ever and anon, a grove, or wood, would receive an armed mass into its bosom, and then seem to be on fire, from the flashing of the sun upon the bayonets. Happily for me it was a day of bright sun-shine, consequently every object looked to advantage; nor, I suspect, have many of our oldest soldiers beheld a more striking panorama than the combination of the objects around me this day produced.

I stood and watched with intense interest the shifting scene, till it gradually settled down into one of quiet. The various brigades, as I afterwards

learned, were only returning from the point towards which the appearance of danger had hurried them, and now proceeded to establish themselves once more in their cantonments. The French general, either awed by the state of preparedness in which he found us, or satisfied with having called us for a few days into the field at this inclement season, laid aside the threatening attitude which he had

assumed. It suited not the policy of our gallant leader, to expose his troops wantonly to the miseries of a winter campaign, and hence rest and shelter were again the order of the day. But in these the corps to which I was attached had as yet no participation, our march being directed, on the following morning, to the vicinity of Fort Charlotte, where the charge of the picquets was once more assigned to us.

THE transactions of the three days, from the 8th to the 11th of January, resembled so completely, in all particulars, the transactions of other days, during which it fell to our lot to keep guard beside the Mayor's house, that I will not try the patience of my reader by narrating them at length. He will accordingly take it for granted, that the ordinary routine of watching and labour was gone through; that no attempt was made, on the part of the enemy, to surprise or harass us; and that, with the exception of a little suffering from extreme cold, and the want of a moderate proportion of sleep, we had no cause to complain of our destiny. When we first came to our ground, we found the redoubt in a state of considerable forwardness; quite defensible, indeed, in case of emergency; and we left it on the last of the month mentioned above, even more perfect, and capable of containing at least a thousand men as its garrison. It was not, however, with any feeling of regret that we beheld a brigade of guards approaching our encampment, about two hours after noon, on the 11th, nor did we experience the slightest humiliation in surrendering to them our tents, our working tools, and the post of honour.

Now, then, we looked forward, not only with resignation, but with real satisfaction, to a peaceable sojourn of a few weeks at Gauthory. We had never, it is true, greatly admired these cantonments, but the events of the last eight or ten days had taught us to set its true value upon a settled habitation of any description; and we accordingly made up our minds to grumble no more. But just as the line of march was beginning to form, intelligence reached us, that the place of our abode was changed; other troops,

it appeared, had been placed in our former apartments; and we were, in consequence, commanded to house ourselves in the village of Bedart. I mean not to assert that the order was received with any degree of dissatisfaction; but feeling as at that moment we did, it was, in truth, a matter of perfect indifference where we were stationed, provided only we had a roof over our heads, and an opportunity was granted of resting from our labours.

The village of Bedart is built upon an eminence, immediately in rear of the large common on which the advanced brigade lay encamped. It consists of about thirty houses, some of them of a tolerable size, but the majority were cottages. Into one of the largest my friend and myself were fortunate enough to be ushered; and as we found chimneys and windows already formed, the former permitting us to keep fires alight without the attendant misery of smoke, and the latter proof against the weather, we sincerely congratulated ourselves on our change of abode. Nor was it only on account of the superiority of these over our former quarters, that we rejoiced in this migration. The country around proved to be better stocked with game, especially with hares, than any which we had yet inhabited; and hence we continued, by the help of our guns and greyhounds, not only to spend the mornings very agreeably, but to keep our own and our friends' tables well supplied.

I have mentioned, in a former chapter, that the little town of Biaritz stands upon the sea-shore, and that it was, at the period of which I now write, regarded as a sort of neutral ground by the French and English armies. Patroles from both did, in

deed, occasionally reconnoitre it; the French, in particular, seldom permitting a day to pass without a party of their light cavalry riding through it. Yet to visit Biaritz became now the favourite amusement amongst us, and the greater the risk run of being sabred or taken, the more eager were we to incur and to escape it. But there was a cause for this, good reader, and I will tell thee what it was.

In peaceable times, Biaritz constituted, as we learned from its inhabitants, a fashionable watering-place to the wealthy people of Bayonne and its vicinity. It was, and no doubt is, now a remarkably pretty village, about as large, perhaps, as Sandgate, and built upon the very margin of the water. The town itself lies in a sort of hollow, between two green hills, which, towards the sea, end in broken cliffs. Its houses were neatly white-washed; and, above all, it was, and I trust still is, distinguished as the residence of two or three handsome females. These ladies had about them all the gaiety and liveliness of Frenchwomen, with a good deal of the sentimentality of our own fair countrywomen. To us they were particularly pleasant, professing, I know not how truly, to prefer our society to that of any persons besides; and we, of course, were far too gallant to deny them that gratification, because we risked our lives or our freedom at each visit. By no means. Two or three times in each week the favoured few mounted their horses, and took the road to Biaritz, from which, on more than one occasion, they with difficulty returned.

With the circumstances of one of these escapes I may as well make my reader acquainted. We were, for the most part, prudent enough to cast lots previous to our setting out, in order to decide on whom, among the party, the ordinary task should devolve of watching outside, to prevent a surprisal by the enemy's cavalry, whilst his companions were more agreeably employed within. So many visits had, however, been paid, without any alarm being given, that one morning, having quitted Bedart fewer in number than usual, we rashly determined to run all risks, rather than that one of the three should spend an hour so cheerlessly. The only precaution which we took was to picquet our horses, ready saddled and bridled, at the garden gate, instead of

putting them up, as we were in the habit of doing, in the stable.

It was well for us that even this slender precaution had been taken. We had sat about half an hour with our fair friends, and had just ceased to joke on the probability of our suffering the fate of Sampson, and being caught by the Philistines, when, on a pause in the conversation taking place, our ears were saluted with the sound of horses' hoofs trampling upon the paved street. We sprang to the window, and our consternation may be guessed at, when we beheld eight or ten French hussars riding slowly from the lower end of the town. Whilst we were hesitating how to proceed, whether to remain quiet, with the hope that the party might retire without searching any of the houses, or expose ourselves to a certain pursuit by flying, we observed a rascal in the garb of a seaman run up to the leader of the patrole, and lay hold of his bridle, enter into conversation with him, and point to the abode of our new acquaintances. This was hint enough. Without pausing to say farewell to our fair friends, who screamed, as if they, and not we, had been in danger, we ran with all haste to the spot where our horses stood, and, springing into the saddle, applied the spur with very little mercy to their flanks. We were, none of us, particularly well mounted; but either our pursuers had dismounted to search the house, or they took at first a wrong direction, for we got so much the start of them before the chase fairly began, that we might have possibly escaped, had we been obliged to trust to our own steeds as far as the picquets. Of this, however, I am by no means certain, for they were unquestionably gaining upon us, as a sailor would say, hand over hand, when, by great good fortune, a patrole of our own cavalry made its appearance. Then, indeed, the tables were completely turned. The enemy pulled up, paused for an instant, and then took to their heels, whilst our troopers, who had trotted forward as soon as they saw what was the matter, put their horses to the speed, and followed. Whether they overtook their adversaries, and what was the issue of the skirmish, if indeed any skirmish took place, I cannot tell; for though we made an attempt to revenge ourselves upon our late pursuers, we soon found

that we were distanced by both parties, and were, perforce, contented to ride quietly home, congratulating each other by the way on our hair-breadth deliverance. From that time forward we were more prudent. Our visits were, indeed, resumed, and with their usual frequency, but we took care not again to dispense with the watchfulness of one, who, on the contrary, took his station henceforth on the top of one of the heights, from which he commanded a view of the surrounding country, to the distance of several miles. Though, therefore, we were more than once summoned to horse, because the enemy's dragoons were in sight, we generally contrived to mount in such time, as to preclude the necessity of riding, as we had before ridden, for life or liberty.

By spending my mornings thus, or in a determined pursuit of game, and my evenings in such society as a corps of gentlemanly young men furnished, nearly a fortnight passed over my head before I was aware that time could have made so much progress. It seldom happens, however, that any period of human existence, whether extensive or contracted, passes by without some circumstance occurring calculated to produce painful sensations. I recollect, in the course of this fortnight, an event, which, though I was no farther concerned in it than as a spectator, made a deep and melancholy impression on my mind. I allude to the loss of a large vessel, during a tremendous storm, on the rocks which run out into the sea off Bedart.

The precise day of the month on which this sad shipwreck occurred, I have forgotten; but I recollect being sent for by my friend during the progress of one of the heaviest gales which we had witnessed, to come and watch with him the fate of a brig, which was in evident distress, about a couple of miles from the land. The wind blew a perfect hurricane on shore; and hence the question was, would the ship succeed in weathering the cape, or would she strike? If she got once round the headland, then her course to the harbour of Secoa was direct; if otherwise, nothing could save her. We turned our glasses towards her in a state of feverish anxiety, and beheld her bending under a single close-reefed top-sail, and making lee-way at a fearful rate, every moment. Presently a sort of attempt was made to luff up, VOL. XVIII.

or tack-it was a desperate one. Great God! I cannot even now think without shuddering of the consequence. The sail, caught by a sudden squall, was shivered into an hundred shreds; down, down she went, before the surge; and in five seconds she struck against a reef; and in ten minutes more, split into a thousand fragments. One gun only was fired as a signal of distress; but who could regard it? We possessed no boats; and had the contrary been the case, this was a sea in which no boat could live. Powerless, therefore, of aid, we could only stand and gaze upon the wreck, till piece by piece' it disappeared amid the raging of the waters. Not a soul survived to tell to what country she belonged, or with what she was freighted; and only one body was drifted to land. It was that of a female, apparently about thirty years of age, genteelly dressed, and rather elegantly formed; to whom we gave such sepulture as soldiers can give, and such as they are themselves taught to expect.

The impression which that shipwreck made upon me was not only far more distressing, but far more permanent, than the impression made by any other spectacle, of which, during the course of a somewhat eventful life, I have been the spectator. For several days I could think of hardly anything besides, and at night my dreams were constantly of drowning men, and vessels beating upon rocks; so great is the effect of desuetude even in painful subjects, and so appalling is death, when he comes in a form in which we are unaccustomed to contemplate him. Of slaughtered men I have, of course, beheld multitudes, as well when life had just departed from them, as when corruption had set its seal upon their forms; but such sights never affected me, no, not even at the commencement of my military career, as I was affected by the loss of that ship, though she went to pieces at too great a distance from the beach to permit more than a very indistinct view of her perishing inmates. Yet there is nothing in reality more terrible in drowning than in any other kind of death; and a sailor will look upon it, I dare say, with precisely the same degree of indifference which a soldier experiences, when he contemplates the prospect of his own dissolution by fire or steel.

In the course of my narrative, I have not made any regular attempt to con

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