purport.
He was thinking, doubtless, that I might have retrieved his fortunes;
and indeed I have very little doubt that I might.

Very soon after, coffee was brought by Monsieur Marchand, Napoleon's
valet-de-chambre, and after partaking of that beverage, and talking
upon the politics of the day, the Emperor withdrew, leaving me
deeply impressed by the condescension he had shown in this remarkable
interview.

CHAPTER III.

A PEEP INTO SPAIN--ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN AND SERVICES OF THE AHMEDNUGGAR
IRREGULARS.

HEAD QUARTERS, MORELLA, Sept. 16, 1838.

I have been here for some months, along with my young friend Cabrera:
and in the hurry and bustle of war--daily on guard and in the batteries
for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, with fourteen severe wounds
and seven musket-balls in my body--it may be imagined that I have had
little time to think about the publication of my memoirs. Inter arma
silent leges--in the midst of fighting be hanged to writing! as the poet
says; and I never would have bothered myself with a pen, had not common
gratitude incited me to throw off a few pages.

Along with Oraa's troops, who have of late been beleaguering this
place, there was a young Milesian gentleman, Mr. Toone O'Connor Emmett
Fitzgerald Sheeny, by name, a law student, and member of Gray's Inn, and
what he called Bay Ah of Trinity College, Dublin. Mr. Sheeny was with
the Queen's people, not in a military capacity, but as representative of
an English journal; to which, for a trifling weekly remuneration, he
was in the habit of transmitting accounts of the movements of the
belligerents, and his own opinion of the politics of Spain. Receiving,
for the discharge of his duty, a couple of guineas a week from the
proprietors of the journal in question, he was enabled, as I need
scarcely say, to make such a show in Oraa's camp as only a Christino
general officer, or at the very least a colonel of a regiment, can
afford to keep up.

In the famous sortie which we made upon the twenty-third, I was of
course among the foremost in the melee, and found myself, after a good
deal of slaughtering (which it would be as disagreeable as useless to
describe here), in the court of a small inn or podesta, which had been
made the head-quarters of several Queenite officers during the siege.
The pesatero or landlord of the inn had been despatched by my brave
chapel-churies, with his fine family of children--the officers quartered
in the podesta