t floor, had no fire-place, we
immediately proceeded to provide it with one, and continued filling
it up with such a load of bricks and mortar that the first floor was
on the point of becoming the ground one; and, having only a choice of
evils, on such an emergency, we, as usual, adopted that which appeared
to us to be the least, cutting down the only two fruit-trees in the
garden to prop it up with. We were rather on doubtful terms with the
landlord before, but this put us all square--no terms at all.

Our animals, too, were in a woful plight, for want of forage. We were
obliged to send our baggage ones, every week, for their rations of
corn, three days' march, through oceans of mud, which ought, properly,
to have been navigated with boats. The whole cavalcade always moved
under the charge of an officer, and many were the anxious looks that
we took with our spy-glasses, from a hill overlooking the road, on the
days of their expected return, each endeavouring to descry his own.
Mine came back to me twice; but "the pitcher that goes often to the
well" was verified in his third trip, for--he perished in a muddy
grave.

His death, however, was not so unexpected as it might have been, for,
although I cannot literally say that he had been dying by inches,
seeing that he had walked all the way from the frontiers of Portugal,
yet he had, nevertheless, been doing it on the grand scale--by miles.
I only fell in with him the day before the commencement of the
campaign, and, after reconnoitring him with my usual judgement, and
seeing that he was in possession of the regulated quantity of eyes,
legs, and mouth, and concluding that they were all calculated to
perform their different functions, I took him, as a man does his wife,
for better and for worse; and it was not until the end of the first
day's march that I found he had a broken jaw-bone, and could not eat,
and I had, therefore, been obliged to support him all along on spoon
diet; he was a capital horse, only for that!

It has already been written, in another man's book, that we always
require just a little more than we have got to make us perfectly
happy; and, as we had given this neighbourhood a fair trial, and _that
little_ was not to be found in it, we were very glad when, towards the
end of February, we were permitted to look for it a little further on.
We broke up from quarters on the 21st, leaving Sir John Hope, with the
left wing of the army, in the investment of B