CHAP. XVIII.

Change of Quarters. Change of Diet. Suttlers. Our new
Quarter. A long-going Horse gone.
Adam's lineal Descendants. St. Palais.

Faubourg of Toulouse. The green Man.

Battle of Toulouse. Peace.

Garonne.
A tender Point.

New Clothing.

Action at Tarbes.

Passage of the

Castle Sarrazin.

TOWARDS the end of the month, some divisions of the French army having left Bayonne, and ascended the right bank of the Adour, it produced a corresponding movement on our side, by which our division then occupied Ustaritz, and some neighbouring villages; a change of quarters we had no reason to rejoice in.

At Arcangues, notwithstanding the influence of our messmate," the Seigneur du Village," our table had, latterly, exhibited gradual symp

toms of decay. But here, our voracious predecessors had not only swallowed the calf, but the cow, and, literally, left us nothing; so that, from an occasional turkey, or a pork-pie, we were now, all at once, reduced to our daily ration of a withered pound of beef. A great many necessaries of life could certainly be procured from St. Jean de Luz, but the prices there were absolutely suicidical. The suttlers' shops were too small to hold both their goods and their consciences; so that, every pin's worth they sold cost us a dollar; and as every dollar cost us seven shillings, they were, of course, not so plenty as bad dinners. I have often regretted that the enemy never got an opportunity of having the run of their shops for a few minutes, that they might have been, in some measure, punished for their sins, even in this world.

The house that held our table, too, was but a wretched apology for the one we had left. A bitter wind continued to blow; and as the granary of a room which we occupied, on the first 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 spyglasses, 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 Bayonne, Lord Wellington followed Soult with the remainder.

The new clothing for the different regiments of the army had, in the mean time, been gradually arriving at St. Jean de Luz; and, as the commissariat transport was required for other purposes, not to mention that a man's new coat always looks better on his own back than it does on a mule's, the different regiments marched there for it in succession. It did not come to our turn until we had taken a stride to the front, as far as La Bastide; our retrograde movement, therefore, obliged us to bid adieu to our division for some time.

On our arrival at St. Jean de Luz, we found our new clothing, and some new friends in the